Winterport native and former Hampden Academy and University of Maine star Mike Bordick owned a Major League Baseball record for 24 years by going 110 consecutive errorless games at shortstop when he was playing for the Baltimore Orioles.
But Oakland Athletics shortstop Jacob Wilson broke the record on Sunday when his errorless game in a 4-3 win over the Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park was his 111th without a miscue.
He extended his record to 112 games with an errorless game in a 10-6 loss to Tampa Bay on Monday night.
The 61-year-old Bordick said his son, Dawson, who lives in Rangeley, contacted him and told him he had learned from one of his friends watching the game that Wilson had broken his record.
Bordick took the news in stride.
“I like that kid. I think he’s a great shortstop,” said Bordick. “I don’t know him personally, but I know his father [Jack] came into the league at the end of my tenure, and I always admired his ability to play shortstop. He was a great defender, and Jacob is no different. He’s just a scrappy guy who makes all the plays.”
Bordick said he feels good that his record lasted so long.
“The meat and potatoes of the game like good defense and baserunning has taken a back seat to [analytics], so it’s nice to see somebody really focusing on that,” he added.
There was a sizable discrepancy between the number of chances Bordick and Wilson had to handle during their record-setting stretches.
Bordick’s streak began on April 11, 2002 and lasted through the end of the season.
He had made an error the day before he began his errorless streak and finished the season with one error in 570 chances for a fielding percentage of .998.
In his first game with Toronto on April 3, 2003, he misplayed a Bubba Trammell grounder in a game against the New York Yankees. He had fielded 544 chances without an error including one earlier in that Yankees game.
Wilson handled 328 consecutive chances during his 111-game errorless stretch.
Bordick said Wilson’s feat brought back memories.
“It makes me think about how fortunate I was to have so many good first basemen who dug my throws out of the dirt: David Segui, Rafael Palmeiro and Jeff Conine. That was very helpful,” said Bordick. “There was also a gracious scorekeeper or two along the way. There’s a little bit of luck involved with things like that including the way the ball bounces.”
After spending three seasons at UMaine where he earned All-New England and All-Northeast Regional Tournament honors, Bordick was signed as a free agent by the Oakland A’s J.P. Ricciardi on July 10, 1986.
He wound up appearing in 1,720 MLB regular season games for Oakland, Baltimore, New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays. He posted a career fielding percentage of .982 with 137 errors in 7,790 chances, and he was a career .260 hitter with 1500 hits, 91 homers, 626 runs batted in and 676 runs scored.
“I was fortunate enough to stay healthy, and when you have that many reps under your belt, the game tends to slow down,” Bordick said. “I was still able to move around OK. I saw the game a little bit differently. I was able to anticipate hops and stuff a little bit better. I was locked into a zone. I wish that would have happened more to me offensively, but it tended to happen to me more defensively in my career.”
He is also known as the man who replaced Cal Ripken Jr. as the Baltimore shortstop after Ripken had appeared in a MLB-record 2,632 consecutive games.
Bordick went on to work for the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network as its game analyst and studio host for the Orioles’ pre-game and post-game shows from 2012-2020 before being laid off as part of massive budget cuts by the network during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Old Town native and veteran play-by-play man Gary Thorne was also laid off.
These days, the father of six is involved with a couple of podcasts: the BMore Sports Podcast, where he is the co-host of the Orioles baseball segment with sportscaster Jerry Coleman, and the nonprofit League of Dreams’ Rocks to Pearls podcast, which focuses on giving kids with disabilities an opportunity to play sports.
Bordick has been involved with the League of Dreams nonprofit for more than 20 years.
The Orioles and University of Maine Sports Hall of Famer, who had his number 3 retired at UMaine, also offered his insight of the blockbuster trade between the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles.
The Orioles sent switch-hitting catcher Adley Rutschman, a three-time American League All-Star, and fellow catcher Jake Rogers to the Red Sox for top-prospect minor league pitchers Anthony Eyanson and Kyson Witherspoon, minor league outfielder Enddy Azocar and Major League catcher Carlos Narvaez.
The Orioles will also get a player to be named later while the Red Sox received cash.
Rutschman was the first overall pick by the Orioles in 2019 while Witherspoon was a first round pick, 15th overall, by the Red Sox, and Eyanson was a third round pick (87th overall), both in 2025.
“From an Orioles fans standpoint, and that’s how I initially took it, it was a failed attempt at rebuilding the Orioles organization. The Orioles went through four years of tanking and when Mike Elias [Orioles president of baseball operations and general manager] finally drafted Adley Rutschman as the first overall pick over Bobby Witt Jr., he was going to be the foundational piece that everything was going to be built around,” said Bordick. “And for him to all of a sudden be traded, it felt like a gut punch.”
He said the Red Sox made the trade to “solely keep Adley Rutschman out of a Yankees uniform.”
Rutschman was expected to make his Red Sox debut in Toronto on Tuesday night after being sidelined with wrist inflammation since July 20.
“He might be one of the best catchers when it comes to selling his soul out for his pitcher. He will do whatever it takes to make that pitcher as good as he can on that given night,” Bordick said.