Rich Dauer, who played second base for the Orioles’ 1983 World Series championship team died at 72, the club announced Monday. Dauer spent all 10 years of his playing career in Baltimore and was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame in 2012.

Dauer, whose nickname while playing in Baltimore was “Wacko,” was a steady presence defensively at second base. And while he wasn’t much of a power hitter, Dauer was a consistent batter and posted a career 14.4 wins above replacement between 1976 and 1985.

Perhaps the highlight of Dauer’s Orioles career came in Game 4 of the 1983 World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies. In a 5-4 win, Dauer provided three hits, including a two-run single in the fourth inning and an RBI single in the seventh.

“If you just kind of look at the stats, it doesn’t tell the whole story,” said Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer in a phone interview. “He was such a good guy. Such a great presence. … On our team, he fit in perfectly, because if you needed a double play turned, he turned the double play.”

Dauer earned his “Wacko” nickname because of his sense of humor. Several funny moments popped into Palmer’s mind Monday afternoon when he learned of Dauer’s death.

At the end of 1982, manager Earl Weaver was set to retire. On the final Sunday morning of the season, with the Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers locked in a tie for the AL East, Weaver called a team meeting. It was a tense atmosphere until Dauer stood up and said, “Don’t tell me, you decided not to retire?”

“It kind of broke the whole mood,” Palmer said, “because it was a big game.”

A year earlier, after Steve Stone won the American League Cy Young Award, Stone took a food critic out to a premier restaurant in South Florida for an interview. In the piece that followed, Stone is quoted as saying: “As much as I love a California Cabernet Sauvignon, you can’t duplicate the richness of a really great Bordeaux as it lies on your tongue.”

Dauer took a clipping of the article, hung it in the clubhouse and highlighted the quote.

“Please tell me you didn’t really say that,” Palmer remembers Dauer telling Stone in front of their teammates.

He gave it as good as he received in that clubhouse, and his enthusiasm on and off the field was part of a positive team culture that lasted long after their days sharing a locker room.

“We all loved him, because he was Richie Dauer,” Palmer said. “If you don’t have teammates like that, I don’t get to the Hall of Fame. We don’t win a lot of games. We don’t go to the World Series. And that’s what the Orioles were about, so he’ll be missed, because he had such a vibrant personality.”

After finishing his playing career, Dauer coached for the Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Colorado Rockies and Houston Astros in various roles. He also served as a minor league manager, leading the San Diego Padres’ Double-A affiliate, the San Antonio Missions, to a Texas League championship in 2013.

Dauer won a second World Series with the Astros as the first base coach. But at the parade, Dauer nearly died. He underwent an emergency brain surgery and experienced a nearly miraculous recovery from an acute subdural hematoma, which is a collection of blood outside the brain. Doctors gave Dauer a 3% chance of survival, according to The Athletic.

In 2019, Dauer was wearing a baseball uniform again, serving as a coach for the American League at the request of then-Astros manager A.J. Hinch. According to a story in The Baltimore Sun at the time, Dauer said he would have loved to return to Baltimore to help coach in some fashion, but noted that the opportunities hadn’t lined up in previous years. Dauer had been a finalist for the manager role in 2003, but the position went to Lee Mazzilli.

“Every single time I’ve had an opportunity, it just didn’t happen, or when there was another opportunity, I had been given a job with somebody else, and I’m certainly not going to give up something that somebody has given me,” Dauer said in 2019. “There’s two things I’ve learned — trust and loyalty in this game is what I want to be known for when I leave.”