Where They Ain't Open ebook - 1999

Excerpt

Chapter Four

Baltimore's Grandest Parade

The Eutaw House was already past its prime. The lazy southern charm that had so enchanted Charles Dickens and Henry Clay and Ulysses S. Grant (while he was still a general) and had enticed Mary Todd Lincoln to stop off for a light meal on her way to New York after her husband was killed had become a little seedy. Maybe that was why the visiting ballclubs could afford it.

The rooms upstairs, moderately priced at $2.50 to $4.50 a night, each had a wooden bed, a straight-backed chair, and a marble-topped dresser with a washstand, but no private bath.

The six-story hotel of yellow brick was ponderous in its presence at the corner of Eutaw and Baltimore streets. Nothing stood taller on Baltimore's skyline than the steeples, and the hotel commanded a view of the bustling harbor a half-dozen blocks to the southeast and, beyond, of Federal Hill, which controlled the entrance to the Inner Harbor and thus to the heart of the city. Around the hotel, a jumble of horsecarts and drays jammed the streets. In the daytime the streets were always noisy -- the shouts of humans and the snorts of animals and, more every day, the squeal of metal.

Cranks crammed the lobby and even the corridors of the Eutaw House on this cloudy April morning. They came to gaze with awe upon the New York Giants. They were giants. Amos Rusie measured six-foot-one and 210 pounds. Roger Connor, the aging first baseman, was two inches miler and ten pounds heavier and had hit more home runs as a ballplayer than anyone ever had. Duke Farrell, the catcher just acquired from the Washington Senators, was six-two. Jouett Meekin, whose pitching almost rivaled Rusie's, was six-one. Except for Yale Murphy, the tiny new shortstop, the smallest man on the team was Johnny Ward, the second baseman and manager, who was a lithe, dapper five-nine.

He and his bigger boys had arrived at Camden Station the previous evening. They had gone immediately to the Eutaw House, for a good night's rest before the opening game of the 'ninety-four season. Johnny Ward paid for a shave and sauntered off to find Ned Hanlon and Harry von der Horst. Ward and Hanlon, old comrades from the Brotherhood, now notables in the League they had battled, good-naturedly wished each other misfortune for the three games to come.

"The Southern trip benefited the Baltimores, but we are still with them," Johnny Ward told the scribes who had gathered, pencils in hand. "What do we expect to do in this series? Well, we will be satisfied with two games, and let you down easy." He had really expected, it was reported afterward, to win all three.

Many of the sporting pundits favored the Giants to take the 'ninety-four pennant. The Orioles were known to be considerably improved, possibly enough to finish fifth or sixth in the twelve-team League.

The men from both teams fraternized in the crowded lobby and rocked in the oversized chairs. By late morning they had donned their uniforms, in anticipation of the one o'clock parade. The Maryland Naval Reserve Band had been playing since ten. Outside the Eutaw House, five thousand Baltimoreans buzzed around the forty open carriages. The musicians, packed uncomfortably onto a barge, played popular tunes as small black boys danced.

In bad times and in good times, Baltimore loved its parades. Sauerwald's Band and Drum Corps rode at the head in a six-horse wagon. After the carriage of newspapermen, Ned Hanlon and Johnny Ward shared a barouche, its driver at the reins on the high front seat. The two catchers, Wilbert Robinson of Baltimore and Duke Farrell of the Giants, occupied the next carriage, with a pair of Orioles and a pair of Giants in each carriage behind. Then came the personages of every description -- the politicians and the men of affairs who were only too happy to associate themselves with the city's finest sportsmen.

The parade took an intricate circuit of the principal avenues, from Eutaw street to Lombard to Sharp to Camden to Charles to Pratt and so on, past the harbor. How pretty the city looked, even as the sun played hide-and-seek. The iron-fronted buildings glistened. All the cornices and ornamental molding were no fancier than the day deserved. Even the plainest of the gray-faced buildings looked revived when they were swathed in orange and black bunting. (Nobody before Hanlon had thought to identify the ballclub with the colors of the Baltimore oriole.) Ladies waved from arched windows on the upper stories of the finest commercial establishments. On the crowded brick sidewalks, throngs of people cheered the players as they passed -- the businessmen in their silk hats and cravats, the street brats who darted from lamppost to lamppost, even the matrons with their parasols and fruited hats. The opposing buildings lining the narrow streets blurred the noise into a din.

At the harbor the tugboats tooted their good wishes. The carriages rattled over the cobblestones, as the parade passed saloons and social clubs, coal dealers and grand hotels, hosiery shops and toy stores. The city's lethargic pace had quickened.

The parade wound back again to Charles street and turned north along the spine of the city. Charles street was too narrow for such an elegant thoroughfare. The three-story buildings bore down on one another; even in early afternoon they blocked out the sun. Yet how glorious an avenue it was, home to jewelers and importers and the city's most eminent clothiers. Men lifted their derbies from their heads and shouted as the carriages rolled by. The parade passed the sixty-five-year-old grand marble shaft that was the nation's original Washington Monument. (The obelisk in the nation's capital, thirty-some miles away, was less than ten years old.) The ballplayers rolled by the city's loveliest residences, its most elaborate churches, and felt at home.

Beyond North avenue, Charles street widened. Scattered houses and fruit trees bordered the drowsy, dusty road. Even there, rooters lined the route and cheered the rebirth of baseball.

Dozens and scores and hundreds of cranks followed the parade all the way to Union Park. Electric streetcars had recently supplanted the old horse-drawn cars, and all of the extra streetcars that had been put on along the York road, a block east of Union Park, were filled to overflowing. Many a venturesome crank risked life and limb to hang by a strap from the doorway, but the nickels kept rolling into the till.

Others came by cable car or by horse-drawn conveyance of every class and description. The livery stables had done a lively business in hiring out rigs. When the carriage yard beside Union Park filled up, nearby residents made some money by using front yards as impromptu stables. Safety bicycles, all the rage with their low wheels and air-filled tires, swooshed along the streets, seeking out the slot rails the cable cars used. The bicycle racks beyond the left-field fence, along Barclay street, found their purpose.

The crowd had swelled around the ticket windows in front of Union Park, a ballpark that looked every bit as unprepossessing as the residential neighborhood in which it sat, with brick row houses on all sides. The front of it was a broad wooden wall twelve feet high, with ornamental lettering, opposite vendors' stands that the crowd swallowed up.

The game was set for four o'clock, but by three the management ceased selling tickets for the grandstand. And still the chimes of the silver quarters never let up. The green eyeshades in the box office grew tired of counting the money, and the gatekeepers were grateful for the turnstiles that kept out the ticketless cranks. As it was, 15,235 ticket-holders passed through -- the mightiest crowd ever to watch baseball on a Baltimore grounds. It was thousands more than when Union Park opened in 'ninety-one and even more than for the game against the St. Louis Browns back in 'eighty-seven as the two nines battled for the American Association lead.

So great was the crush that the management opened a gate that sent a torrent of ticket-holders pouring into the farther reaches of the outfield, where two hundred policemen corralled them behind hand-held ropes. Maybe a thousand other rooters watched the proceedings for free -- boys clustered around the knotholes or high up on telegraph poles or sedentary cranks who claimed a few square feet on a nearby rooftop. A row of houses lay just beyond the center field fence and others alongside each foul line. Students from the Woman's College of Baltimore (renamed in later years for the Rev. John F. Goucher, its second president) huddled with their teachers on the roof of the Latin Building to ogle the boys of spring. Even the distant rooters could catch the languorous strains of the orchestra in the ballpark, playing "Be Kind, for They Are Orphans."

Inside, Union Park looked fancier than ever, having been gussied up over the winter. The balcony of the double-decked grandstand was yet to be finished, but orange and black bunting was strung along the upper tier. Lines of flags connected the poles overhead. The grandstand was a profusion of black and white, the men in their frock coats and derbies. The unusually large contingent of ladies showed off their spring millinery, their silks and satins, their bustle skirts and their hourglass dresses with billowy sleeves.

Harry von der Horst had lavished complimentary tickets on the men who mattered in the city -- the mayor, the governor, a congressman or two, the state's attorney, judges and capitalists and preachers and politicians -- thirteen hundred altogether, each for admission of the holder and a guest. Baltimore was stratified by class and calling, as any city was, but not so much in the ballpark. Judges sat by mechanics, merchants by laborers, bosses by clerks. Out by the bleachers, on a rough pine fence only two inches wide, a Charles street swell in a top hat and a Prince Albert coat perched next to an urchin whose shoes needed new uppers and soles. On the sun-bleached benches along the right field line, ragamuffins squeezed next to Fauntleroys in velvet, the sons of Africa by the scions of Europe.

"For the time being, caste was forgotten," the city's Republican newspaper rhapsodized the next morning, "and all were sons of one father."

The cranks had matters more mundane on their minds. "Beer, ginger ale, lemonade, cigars, peanuts, cigarettes," the vendors in the bleachers cried. "What is it, gents? Wet your throats so ye kin holler." Only soft drinks were sold in the grandstand, but in the bleachers the brewed stuff flowed. Or the rooters could buy the sausage-like sandwiches that the city's German-Americans had known as Weckers and had bought at the Baltimore ballgrounds for years. The stands were filled as well with the harsh smell of strong tobacco, as almost everyone seemed to be puffing on a cigar or a meerschaum or a thin cheroot or a cigarette. Out by the flagpole inside the center field fence, the black scoreboard for the other League games still had nothing to say.

Umpire Tom Lynch, austere and firm, tore the red cover off the new white ball. He took on a practiced air of importance. There was no other arbiter on the diamond but he.

The gong rang out. It was really a big bell on the front of the upper stands, with a cord to the Orioles' bench. The Giants, in their baggy flannel uniforms, trotted out to their positions in the field. The Orioles had chosen to bat first. They collected on the bench, at the crook of the grandstand. The Baltimore ballplayers' new uniforms, antiseptically white, had black stockings almost to the knee and flat-topped white caps sheathed by double black rings.

"Play ball!" Umpire Lynch yelled out.

The huge crowd cheered as John McGraw -- zealous, on edge, as always -- strode to the plate. The field was lush, except for the basepaths and the runway of dirt from the rubber to home plate. The grass, painstakingly tended, was thicker along the first and third base lines, the better to keep bunts from rolling foul. Out beyond the diamond, spectators as many as thirty deep concealed where right field sloped away. By ground rules, anything hit into the crowd was a two-bagger.

John McGraw seemed very small, at Amos Rusie's mercy. The longer distance had not troubled the Giant twirler much, nor being confined to the rubber. He was in better shape than ever for the start of the season and flung an assortment of his hard-thrown shoots and nerve-wracking curves. McGraw was patient at the plate. At last he picked out a pitch and drove it on a line into left field. The outfielder ran hard and got to the ball -- and muffed it.

McGraw danced at first base. The crowd shrieked with glee.

Now Willie Keeler, the littlest man on the team, came to the plate. His short, stubby bat was just thirty inches long and weighed only twenty-nine ounces. The League had never seen a bat so small. The folds of the plain white flannel hung from his skimpy frame. The black stockings reached up over his calves.

"The only way I have ever managed to hit Amos," Willie was learning, "is by standing well up to the plate and meeting the ball squarely. If I should swing hard at the ball I would lose my balance and the curve would fool me."

Willie slammed a pitch so hard at Yale Murphy that the Giants' rookie shortstop fumbled it.

Amos Rusie bore down when he had to, rendering Joe Kelley and Dan Brouthers and Steve Brodie harmless. Sadie McMahon was every bit as wizardly. The Orioles' ace threw with heat and worked his curves with subtle distinction, and his teammates backed him up in the field. Brodie was a streak of lightning. Willie was too. In the second inning, when one of the Giants' smaller sluggers drove a pitch deep into right field, Willie turned and ran at the crack of the bat and leaped the rope, scattering the spectators in a detonation of derbies. He caught the ball on the dead run.

By the eighth inning the Orioles had built a promising though hardly impregnable lead of 5 to 1. When Wilbert Robinson led off, a delegation of rooters presented the team's captain with a silver-handed umbrella engraved ROBBIE. In such situations, the honored batsman typically hit two long fouls and then struck out. Robbie whipped a pitch past the shortstop instead. After McMahon flied out, McGraw lined a beauty into center field. With two men on base, Willie came to bat. He had struck out -- twice. Nerves, no doubt. Again, Rusie got two strikes on him, but this time he would not get a third. Willie drove the pitch out to left field, into the crowd, for two bases. Robbie scored.

With two outs Big Dan Brouthers came to bat. The barrel-chested slugger was cheered to the echo as he lumbered to the plate. He let several of Rusie's pitches go by. The next pitch leapt from his heavy bat, into distant center field. It soared over the heads of the awestruck crowd. The ball struck the center field fence three feet from the top and bounced back. By the ground rules, a two-bagger. Union Park had never witnessed as long a hit.

In the bleachers, the cranks rose as one and surged from side to side in a wave.

The game ended with the Orioles ahead, 8 to 3. Strangers hugged in the stands. In the outfield the crowd burst its ropes and turned the ballgrounds into a writhing mass of running men and boys. One of the Baltimore newspapers delivered its taunt the next morning:

And somewhere there is laughter,

And somewhere children shout,

But there is no joy in Gotham,

The Giants are laid out.

The Orioles won the next game, as Willie scored the winning run. The following afternoon, he came to bat in the seventh inning with the score 3 to 3. The tie was McGraw's doing: He had just slashed a single that sent Hughey and Robbie across home plate. The crowd went wild. Willie stood erect at the plate, utterly alert. As the pitcher threw McGraw started to steal. Johnny Ward dashed to second base and Willie poked the ball through the hole Ward had left vacant. Willie kicked up the dust on the basepath as McGraw slammed into third base. On Steve Brodie's fly ball, Mac scored the winning run.

So much for New York's high-blown pride.

Harry von der Horst declared that he would buy each of his ballplayers a hat. "None of the boys will require larger sizes than usual," The Sun presumed.

Or might they? "That one series made the Orioles," McGraw recounted later. "Seeing that our stuff had worked, we were full of confidence and cockiness."

Out along the York road, a ten-minute walk from the ballpark, most of the Orioles had taken rooms at the Oxford House, a quaint and comfortable wood-frame hotel with a spacious lawn and prints of fox hunts and horseraces decorating the rooms. The proprietor was an elderly Englishman with bushy side-whiskers and no interest in baseball.

Willie Keeler had a room. John McGraw had another. So did Hughey Jennings and Steve Brodie and Dan Brouthers and Sadie McMahon and two other pitchers and both utility men. The players enjoyed one another's company. They sang on the porch in the evenings. After breakfast they scrambled for the hammock on the back porch, as a place to skim the newspapers. Every morning for a week it was claimed by John McGraw. Soon the others stopped trying.

"Aggressiveness," McGraw said later, "is the main thing in baseball."

He showed it every day on the diamond. He dived into bases and blocked the hard hits that Billy Shindle would have let by for two-baggers. "Little Mac at third was a whole team and a dog under the wagon," the Morning Herald in Baltimore said as the Giants skulked out of town. "His skin is full of baseball, and when he starts into a game he forgets everything else and thinks only of winning. He is absolutely fearless, and will not get out of the way of anything or anybody." He pursued every advantage. In the third game against the Giants, when a wild pitch nicked his bat, he clutched the back of his head and started for first base. When the umpire refused to be fooled, even Mac cracked a smile.

His teammates both loved and feared him. He could inspire them -- or ridicule them -- to new levels of intensity. He made sure that they kept one another in line. "Woe betide the player who failed us!" McGraw said. "His life on the bench was not a pleasant one. He never forgot the roasting and never failed to deliver one if somebody else failed."

The Orioles were as lively as crickets. The champion Beaneaters, who followed the Giants into Union Park, led by two runs going into the ninth inning, when the Orioles rose up and scored fourteen. Every afternoon saw a different hero. Willie beat out grounders to first base. He and Mac worked the hit-and-run once or twice -- even three times -- a game. Robbie, the stout catcher, stole bases. Dan Brouthers unleashed his wagon-tongue bat and once even drove a pitch over the right-center field fence, so that a sign was put up boasting, HERE. (Legend later had it that the ball bounced over to Calvert street and landed in a coal car at Union Station, winding up in Philadelphia.) The next day it was Joe Kelley's home run, on top of his triple and two acrobatic catches. Hughey Jennings was learning to tighten the muscles in his torso to brace himself for getting hit by the pitch. "Oh yes it takes nerve," he confided, "but you can't play ball without nerve."

Nerve was what the Orioles had -- and smarts. They were too young and too full of themselves to know they could not invent whatever they wished. Night after night, in the viscous heat of the Baltimore summer, McGraw and Keeler and Kelley and Jennings sat up and puzzled out schemes to win ballgames. Who needed Hanlon? "Then we'd go out to the ballpark the next day and try them out, practicing them till we got them letter perfect," McGraw recollected. For hours they calibrated the chances of a runner's scoring from third base on a sacrifice bunt if he dashed for the plate at the pitcher's first motion. On the diamond they discovered that, on a bunt anywhere inside the foul lines, the runner could not be thrown out if he left instantly. And thus, as McGraw remembered it, the squeeze play was born.

The Orioles thrived on speed and surprise. Taking the extra base became the rule. (For the season they would hit 150 triples in 128 games and steal 324 bases.) There was nothing they would not try. Everything was game, if no rule stood against it -- or even if one did. Science decreed it: No possibility was to be overlooked.

This made Tom Murphy important. He was the groundskeeper at Union Park, an understated man with dark regular features and the longest, thickest, droopiest moustache at the ballgrounds. Murph knew his business. As a groundskeeper in Indianapolis he had discovered a hard-throwing amateur named Amos Rusie. In Baltimore he made the field to his liking. He built up the ground just outside the third base line so that bunts might stay fair. He packed the path to first base ever so slightly downhill, to help the Orioles' speedsters. He mingled soap flakes with the soil around the pitcher's rubber, to cause the unwary perspiring twirlers to lose their grip. (The Orioles' pitchers carried dirt in their pockets.) The infield dirt was mixed with clay, to formulate a soil almost as hard as concrete. All summer long the infield remained unwatered, as a boon to the baserunners and the Baltimore chop. Willie once chopped down at the ball and made a two-bagger.

The Orioles hit the ball hard and often, and also with judgment. Even when the opposing teams suspected what was coming, often there was little they could do. Defending against the hit-and-run required letting McGraw steal a base or pitching wide to Willie or varying who would cover second base so that Willie guessed wrong in placing the ball. But he usually guessed right. Against the Cleveland Spiders one afternoon in June, Willie punched the ball through the second baseman's spot and, a few innings later, through the shortstop's. He was liable to get four hits in one game and three in the next.

When the League issued the averages for the batsmen a few days later, Joe Kelley, who rammed the ball and raced down the basepaths, ranked third, at .391. Willie Keeler was fifth, at .372. "Batters of the new school," Hanlon called them. "Most of the men have been educated to call for a high or low ball, but these players hit at anything, high or low, equally well, and they keep a pitcher guessing."

That was the key: Keep them guessing. That took teamwork. Get a man on first base and his teammates would bring him home. Hanlon meant to build a machine of interlocking pieces. "In addition to superior physical qualities," one of the Baltimore newspapers noted, "the fin de siecle players must possess a high order of brains, must be of correct habits, have plenty of ambition and be possessed of a certain docility and evenness of temperament such as will insure proper discipline and the frictionless working together of the whole team."

Forget the docility. But the rest was in evidence. The last-place team of 'ninety-two and the eighth-place team of 'ninety-three finished June of 'ninety-four in first place. The League had never seen such an emergence.

The Orioles split a doubleheader in Louisville, where the cranks bestowed a floral horseshoe on Hughey Jennings, their lost favorite. The Fourth of July was hot back in Baltimore, as it always was, though certainly the heat was easier to endure in pursuing pleasure than at work. The bicyclists made their own breeze. The air stirred now and again among the picnickers on the manicured slopes of Druid Hill Park. All over the city, the flags on homes occasionally unfurled.

Patriotism was a little harder to come by, however, what with the savage strikes and the deepening depression. On the Fourth, President Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago to break the Pullman strike, which had halted most of the rail traffic coming into the city and in much of the nation. That provoked three days of riots in which thirty men died. The nation had started to feel old; nobody was left who remembered its beginnings.

When John von der Horst awoke on the Fourth, he was expected to live another month. He had resided for sixty-nine years on this earth, forty-nine of them in an adopted land. He had come home from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia a month before, still uncured, and had already built a mausoleum near the front gate of Baltimore Cemetery, within sight of his beloved brewery. Made of Italian marble, with a copper roof and a door of solid bronze, it was worthy of him. But he was not ready to move in. With his iron will, he had survived past the first of July, to see his second son become a partner in the brewery's profits. To his first son, that meant ballplayers he could not buy.

At ten in the morning the old man seemed in no danger. By midafternoon he was dead.

John Jr. found the will in his father's vest pocket. Lena, a family member of mysterious origin, had put it there -- at the old man's direction, she testified later -- two days before he died. She was twenty now, an auburn-haired young gentlewoman, short but elegant, who harbored hopes of becoming a concert organist. Lena had married Henry Wilkins, who was charming enough but had no head for business. Yet she was still a member of the household, as confusingly as ever. When she was a little girl, John von der Horst had described her to the census-takers as his granddaughter. She was barely older than Harry's two daughters, who shared the stucco house. But in his will he named her as his daughter, which was apparently the truth. Whether he had formally adopted her no one could say for sure. It was assumed that he was her natural father, by someone other than his upstanding wife, Johanna.

But whatever he was to Lena, she was devoted to him, and to Johanna, ministering to them in their declining years. After Johanna died, in the summer of 'ninety-three, the old man needed Lena more than ever. Now he made his appreciation known, with a third of his estate.

Harry and John wasted no time. They were both twice her age and viewed her with contempt. Harry renounced his position as a coexecutor (appointed along with John Jr.) of his father's estate, so that he might challenge the provisions of the will.

Lena was quicker into court. Barely two weeks after the old man died she swore in Orphans' Court that Harry and John Jr. "have conspired to do all in their power" to break the will and deprive her of what was rightfully hers. She asked the judge to name someone other than John Jr. to administer an estate that she estimated to be worth an astonishing $300,000.

The brothers and their lawyers scoffed at Lena's "disordered imagination." She was no sister of theirs, they said -- no relation at all.

They need not have worried. Under Maryland law, even a conspiracy was no reason to disqualify an executor. A panel of judges dismissed her petition. The legal wrangling, however, had only begun.

For a while it seemed as if the Orioles would be stranded in Chicago because of the rail strike, but Hanlon had an idea. He and Harry von der Horst draped banners -- Baltimore Base Ball Club -- from both sides of the Orioles' railway car, in hopes that the strikers would let them pass through. The ballplayers were labor, were they not? Evidently they were, for the strikers allowed them to escape to Cleveland.

They should have stayed in Chicago. The trip brought an awful slump. They lost two of three to Louisville -- the godforsaken Colonels! -- and got thrashed in Cincinnati. Their hitting fell off -- Mac's and Willie's and Kelley's and pretty much everyone but Brodie's. What a batsman Brodie could be. On the ninth of July he got six hits (and Willie got five) as the Orioles came from behind, 0 to 9, to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 14 to 10. The Virginian would swing at anything, and often he hit it. Halfway through the season his batting average soared as high as .382. That was nothing like his spirit in the field. Once when he muffed a fly ball, he pounded his head and shouted at himself: "You ought to go home and pick blackberries; you ain't worth seven dollars a year; you would muff an apple dumpling if you were hungry!" He once stopped as he rounded third base to cheer his teammates on and got tagged out. Another time he leaned a ladder against the right field fence to go after a heckler in the stands, until his teammates dissuaded him. He played with an abandon that served his teammates well.

But it was not enough. Not only had the batting fallen off; the pitching was worse. Sadie McMahon pitched beautifully, sometimes invincibly, with his sharp curves and his new slow teaser, but his arm was getting tired from so much use. The other twirlers, Hanlon said, "seem to think they are doing quite well enough and are content with that." Bert Inks, the tall undisciplined left-hander, had been over-weight and smoked too much down in Macon, so that Hanlon sent him to a Turkish bath to get in condition. Tony Mullane, the ambidextrous veteran, was despised by his teammates. ("Yes, those are the bruises he got when I hit him with a potato roller," his wife testified in the divorce trial in a crowded Cincinnati courtroom on the seventh of July, "after he had cut me with a knife and smashed a water pitcher over my head.") Hanlon's three-man rotation kept changing. As soon as the Orioles got back to Baltimore, three of the pitchers went out on a drunk.

Hanlon called his players together and talked to them like a father. He told them he knew what the trouble was and had every man promise faithfully he would abstain from drinking for the rest of the season. Willie Keeler and John McGraw were teetotalers already. Now they all vowed to be. Hanlon imposed no fines, and even lifted one he had inflicted on Inks.

The Orioles lost three straight to New York and three more to Boston. They fell out of first place for a day, then regained it. Before long the Beaneaters overtook them once more. The critics brayed that the Orioles had been playing out of their class.

Hanlon went to work. He needed pitching the most. Whatever Hanlon wanted, Harry von der Horst was happy to oblige. Hanlon had his eye on Kid Gleason, a gutty right-hander from the Camden, New Jersey, waterfront who had won ninety-nine games the past four seasons and was known to be unhappy in St. Louis. He joined the Orioles in July. Soon Hanlon bought a big left-handed workhorse, Charley Esper of the Senators, who had lost more games -- twenty-eight -- than anyone in the League the previous season.

More was to come. By season's end the Orioles had spent more to strengthen their team than had the other eleven ballclubs combined.

The Orioles stood two games behind the Beaneaters and one ahead of the Giants when the New Yorkers came to Baltimore in the searing days of August. Sadie McMahon was supposed to pitch, but his arm hurt, so Kid Gleason went to the rubber instead. He had a pleasant clean-shaven face and a boyish blond forelock. Not much bigger than McGraw, he was almost as tough. He never ducked a fight and could lick a man who was fifty pounds heavier.

As the game went on, the Orioles seemed different somehow. Maybe it was something Hanlon had said or the sense of helplessness that came in facing Amos Rusie. They stopped trying to knock the ball out of the lot, as when they had been losing, but returned to their strength, resting content with a succession of sharply hit singles. Willie Keeler got three of them, breaking out of a slump. (He had gone through four games in a row without hitting safely.) It seemed like ages since the Orioles had displayed such clean, scientific hitting. They showed ginger.

They won by 12 to 9 that day and by 20 to 1 the next afternoon, when Willie and Joe Kelley struck four hits apiece and Hughey Jennings got five. Sadie McMahon's arm ached but he pitched anyway, and exceedingly well. What glorious fun they were having. This, every Baltimorean knew, was why God had made baseball.

Harry von der Horst dined that evening with Eddie Talcott, the treasurer of the Giants, who had made his fortune on Wall Street. An old black man stationed himself beneath the open window of the restaurant. As Harry exhorted his friend from New York not to feel glum, a warbling came from the sidewalk below, to the tune of "Tit-willow":

A young man from New York, silent sat at his plate

Singing Oriole, Oriole, Oriole.

Why am I consigned to this awful hard fate?

Oh! Oriole, Oriole, Oriole.

Is it weakness of pitching or muffing, he cried;

Or a great run of base hits all on the wrong side?

Then he swallowed his napkin and slowly he died,

Singing...

Right field at Union Park was the terror of visiting ballplayers. It was rough and weedy and sloped down to the fence. The fence itself, of uneven pine boards, was slanted on the inside at something like sixty-five degrees (so that the advertising might be seen from the grandstands). The field was often spongy, because of the stream on the other side of the fence. It was a rotten field to play.

Willie loved it. Its vastness lent him an advantage, with his speed and his unerring sense of where the ball would land. He made hard catches look easy. No longer did Steve Brodie intimidate him; they never got balled up chasing fly balls. "He knew his territory like a child its ABCs," the center fielder said of Willie.

When Willie was near the fence, the incline of the ground meant that he could not be seen from home plate. This offered opportunities. Murph had kept the distant grass thick and tangled, so that things might be concealed. Once, Willie and Brodie both went tearing after a ball into right-center field. Brodie threw it back in to Robbie just as Willie flung a planted ball in. When the umpire reproved him, Willie stood there and grinned.

On the field Willie was ordinarily quiet and serious. His voice was rarely heard, other than, "I've got it." But baseball was a rough game, and the ballplayers -- any ballplayer -- took every advantage. Willie was impish about it. His teammates were less so. Each of them had his own way at the umpires. Willie was apologetic. Robbie would smile and kid them. Hughey would try to reason with them. Joe Kelley would scream. John McGraw would tread on toes and use vile language that Harry von der Horst worried the ladies might hear, which sometimes they did.

In the eighth inning of the last game of the season between the Orioles and the Giants, Mac was easily put out as he ran to first base. Yet he managed, as he crossed the bag, to veer several feet out of his way to gash the first baseman's leg. McGraw had taken to sharpening his spikes for his opponents to see.

"It was all done for its psychologic effect on the ballgame," McGraw explained. "But to make it good we'd go tearing into a bag with flying spikes as though with murderous intent. We were a cocky, swashbuckling crew and we wanted everybody to know it -- and as a result we won a lot of our games before the first ball was ever pitched."

And win they did. They edged back into first place.

Labor Day had never been celebrated as a national holiday before, but in 'ninety-four, to help regain the workingman's trust in the depths of the depression, President Cleveland signed legislation that made the first Monday in September an official day off. The unions around Baltimore competed for the biggest delegation in the parade -- the cigarmakers, the granite cutters, the glassblowers, the bakers, the blacksmiths, the Lithuanian tailors, and dozens more.

Labor's holiday, however, was as much for diversion as demonstration. The crowd was the largest ever to watch baseball in Baltimore. A seething mass of more than 24,000 cranks, not counting the unwashed who tore boards off the fence and sneaked in, overran Union Park to watch the Orioles host the Cleveland Spiders for a doubleheader. Fashion dictated that this was the last day that men might wear straw hats, and quite a few got knocked off in the mob. But their owners remained good-natured. They watched the Orioles overwhelm the Spiders, by 13 to 2 and (against the rosy-cheeked Cy Young) by 16 to 3. Willie struck six singles and a double in the two games. Joe Kelley came to bat nine times and got nine hits, five of them two-baggers. There was no stopping him. Kel was strong and swift and brimming with self-confidence. He was none too brilliant and he liked to imbibe from time to time. But scientific baseball did not really need intellectual firepower. It took quickness and competitiveness and a willingness to think and a passion for surprise. Those he had. Kel hit with power and could outrun an insult. In left field, the easiest of the outfield positions, he was deft as a unicyclist.

The Orioles went west. They had won thirteen in a row, the last twelve without Sadie McMahon, whose arm had gone lame. Still they kept winning, behind Kid Gleason and Charley Esper and now George Hemming, the former Louisville right-hander, with his thin face and his sly moustache and the unself-consciously arrogant look that Hanlon favored in his twirlers.

Everything clicked. The Orioles had speed, Willie and Kel most of all. "Why, he is so fast you can hardly follow him!" a young lady in the stands was heard to say of Willie. No one in the League could beat the left-handed batsman from home to first base. The team was running second in the League in stolen bases. In the field, they sparkled. Hughey Jennings was quickly coming to be considered the premier shortstop in the land. He got to grounders that no one else would have bothered to try for. Willie ranked second among the League's right fielders. Not since 'seventy-eight, when League ballclubs played half as many games, had a team made so few errors in a full season.

Even better was the batting. McGraw's had fallen off but Kelley's never flagged. The heaviest hitter on the ballclub, he batted .541 in the last thirty games of the season. Willie's average was climbing, too, as he often got three or four hits in a game. "Keeler had the best batting eye I have ever seen," McGraw judged many years later. "He held his bat away up in the middle with only about a foot of it extending beyond his hands and he could slap the ball to either field. It was impossible to play for him. I have seen the outfield come in behind the infield and the infielders close up till you'd think you couldn't have dropped the ball into an open spot if you had it in your hand -- but Keeler would invariably punch a base hit in there somewhere." Before the season was finished, the cranks speculated, Willie would overtake Kel as the team's top batsman.

Best of all was the Orioles' snap and ginger -- "Get at 'em!" was Robbie's cry -- and the way the ballplayers worked as one. When the season was over the same three outfielders had played side by side in all 129 games. McGraw claimed that he and Willie had practically revolutionized the style of hitting, so that advancing the runner became the new style of attack. The hit-and-run, the squeeze play, the Baltimore chop -- base by base, they went at it, patiently, relentlessly, until they succeeded.

Willie had never had so much fun. "Say, I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world," he told his teammates. "I get paid for doing what I'd rather do than anything else -- play ball."

As captain and catcher, Robbie ran the team on the field. But it was Hanlon's team. Every so often the manager called the ballplayers together and painstakingly pointed out each of their faults and offered pointers on some tactic of the game -- how to execute a double steal, how to back one another up. In his remote and understated way, he could be heavy-handed. His attention to detail could get on his ballplayers' nerves. But more often than not, he applied just the right touch. He steadied Hughey's temperament and kept Steve Brodie's high spirits aimed not at the management or at his teammates but at the Orioles' opponents. The workouts with Joe Kelley had borne fruit as well.

The Orioles won their eighteenth consecutive game on the sixteenth of September, in the first of a Sunday doubleheader in Cincinnati. (Only in the West did baseball share the Lord's day.) In the second game, the Reds filled the bases in the first inning when the runners on first and second started to steal. Robbie ran the ball out into the infield -- either man was a sure out. The runner on third base broke for home. Robbie did too -- and slipped on the wet grass. Everybody was safe, and a run was home.

Two innings later, Reds on second and third tried again to steal. Robbie ran the ball toward third base, for an easy toss, and flung the ball into the mud at John McGraw's feet. Later in the inning the runner at third put the Reds ahead, 4 to 3.

With two outs in the last inning, the score unchanged, Joe Kelley hit his second two-bagger of the game. Willie Keeler came to bat. He had already hit a single and a double. Three thousand cranks squealed. On the Baltimore bench, hopes ran high. Willie stood with perfect attention, his bat concealed behind his thin, determined frame. He swung. A grounder dribbled ingloriously to the second baseman. The winning streak ended.

The next six games, the Orioles won.

The Giants, every bit as adamant, passed the Beaneaters and kept in the Orioles' shadow. The Orioles were undeterred. They went to Cleveland needing one more victory to clinch the pennant. They lost the first game, then prepared to face Cy Young the next afternoon. He remembered everyone's weakness and calmly, undemonstratively, took advantage.

Back in Baltimore the excitement ran high. "The success of the Baltimores is the greatest advertisement the town ever had," a grain merchant informed a wandering scribe. At Ford's Grand Opera House, at Fayette and Eutaw streets, where Horace Greeley had been nominated for the presidency back in 'seventy-two, hundreds of cranks crowded beneath the frescoes and chandeliers of the recently modernized theater to watch the Compton Electric Base-Ball Game Impersonator. Using an ingeniously constructed curtain that featured a diamond, movable figures and bells of different tones, the game from Cleveland was played out on Ford's eminent stage as the news of it flowed in by telegraph.

The game was a crackerjack. Though Cy Young had won two dozen games, all season the Orioles had found him an easy mark. Charley Esper, reluctant to throw his stow pitch, was hardly better. Going into the fourth inning the score stood 5 to 5. With one man out and another on base, Willie Keeler came to bat. In the first inning he had bunted and scored. This time Young threw just what Willie wanted. He drove the pitch to the farthest reach of right-center field. He raced around to home plate, and beat the throw.

When the twenty-seventh Spider was dispensed with, and the score stood 14 to 9, the Orioles flung themselves into one another's arms. They danced around the bat bags and howled. Hanlon cast his dilapidated straw hat, which he had promised to wear until the championship was won, to the winds.

At Ford's Grand Opera House pandemonium broke loose. Hats were flung toward the rafters. Harry yon der Horst pranced across the stage, waving an orange-and-black pennant. In silver letters it proclaimed: Champions, 1894.

The shouts awakened the ballplayers, asleep on the train. It was five in the morning but a crowd had gathered at the railway station in Grafton, in the dour hills of West Virginia.

"Jennings! Jennings!" the men chanted. They were coal miners, as Hughey had been.

The train was not permitted to continue on its way to Baltimore until the finest shortstop on earth popped his sunburnt, carrot-topped head out through a window, into the dawning day.

Farther east along the Baltimore & Ohio track, past the rocky cliffs, in the hamlets of Oakland and Piedmont, the throngs of cranks called Oriole after Oriole to the platform.

The pennant winners stopped for breakfast in Cumberland, in the mountains of western Maryland. It seemed as if every man, woman, and child in the town had turned out. Shout after shout went up as the Orioles descended from the train. Everything was decorated in black and orange. The ballplayers wore their sharp new black sweaters with orange piping as they forced their way through the crowd. At the Queen City Hotel, a banner over the porch declared: "Cumberland Welcomes the Champions. Get at 'em!"

A thirty-piece band struck up "Maryland, My Maryland." Inside the hotel, as the Orioles ate, the ladies of Cumberland filed in to watch. They marveled at what a handsome fellow McMahon was and wondered which one was Brouthers and which was Robinson. The prying eyes made Willie and McGraw, the youngest of the Orioles, lose a little of their appetites.

As the team re-emerged into the morning, the cranks of Cumberland outside the hotel hollered: "Hanlon! Hanlon!" And then: "Speech! Speech!"

The quiet manager removed his hat. "Ladies and gentlemen of Cumberland," he began. "In behalf of the Baltimore baseball club I thank you for this hearty and unexpected greeting." He promised that the Orioles would play a game in Cumberland, once they had defeated the Giants for the Temple Cup, in the postseason series to come. He was presented with a colossal glass bat filled with ten-year-old rye, which Hanlon vowed not to drink for another ten years.

The ballplayers crooned a ballad written for them, "We'll Hang Johnny Ward from a Sour Apple Tree." The crowd went wild.

An escort committee of twenty distinguished Baltimoreans -- ten had not sufficed -- met the train in Washington. The crowd was already gathering in Baltimore, at Camden Station, the turreted brick terminus of the B&O, the nation's oldest commercial railroad.

The train was due in at 6:35 on a Tuesday evening, the second of October. By five o'clock some five thousand cranks had gathered. This had grown to twenty-five thousand by five-thirty and to fifty thousand by half past six. Darkness had fallen. When the rooters realized that buying a ticket to any destination earned a place on the railway platform, there was a surge of interest in short trips to the suburbs. Young men climbed the poles in the station and out along the rafters over the track.

Cheers went up when the headlight of a locomotive came into sight. The train arrived three minutes early -- snap and ginger, indeed. Fireworks went off inside the station. Outside, the throngs heard it and set off a din such as the city had never known.

The new champions could barely edge their way onto the platform. A fife and drum corps of forty boys led the Orioles, in their uniforms, through the station. The crowds parted to let the players through to their carriages, then immediately closed up again, stranding the reception committee and the newspapermen. It took the policemen an hour to untangle the mob and get the parade moving toward the Fifth Regiment Armory.

It was the grandest parade that Baltimore had ever seen. More than two hundred thousand people came out for it -- almost half the city. The route was impassable, until cops on horseback cleared a lane through the pulsating crowd. In front of City Hall, a father lugged his baby boy up a tall lamppost to peer down on the Orioles as they passed.

"The procession itself was part parade, part masquerade, part a mounted cavalcade and part a show of celebrities," The Sun discerned. Sauerwald's Band and Drum Corps marched in front, followed by the carriages bearing the ballplayers and the reception committee. Small boys swarmed twenty deep around their heroes, ignoring the danger from hoofs and carriage wheels to gaze with unutterable admiration into the face of whichever Oriole they worshiped. The last carriage bore the ball used in the pennant-clinching game.

The majesty of the parade came from what followed the carriages. Anyone who wanted to could march. Two hundred groups had signed up, including the Married and Single Men Base-Ball Club, the Baltimore City College class of 'ninety-seven, the Fifth-Ward Jolly Six Rooters (on a decorated float), the Mercantile Club (with three floats), the Night Owls' Union, the Adonis Pleasure Club (with a band), the East Branch YMCA barrel wagon, the Station B letter-carriers (in evening dress), the William H. Newmyer Yacht Club, the Madison Square 'Cycle Club, and so on. The parade included sophisticated men in silk hats and hogs wrapped in orange and black. Participants rode on decorated wagons, hired hacks, drays, glossy barouches, sand-carts, and the backs of horses. A precocious fourteen-year-old named Henry L. Mencken rode in the parade with his brother Charlie and the Lurssen boys next door.

The parade went on for miles. The tail end of it was just uncoiling at Camden Station as the ballplayers completed their circuitous route around downtown and out Howard street to the armory. The arched metal roof surrounded by medieval stone sheltered the largest hall in the city. The mayor and the governor and almost twenty thousand rooters waited.

The pennant, five feet high at the pole and twenty-five feet wide, hung across the front of the cavernous hall. "Champion Base Ball Club of the United States," it announced in red, white, and blue. "BALTIMORE 1894."

Ferdinand Latrobe, the portly seven-term mayor, declared, "We have always had the most beautiful women and the finest oysters in the world, and now we have the best baseball club."

The Orioles survived the speeches and went on to a banquet at the Hotel Rennert, at Saratoga and Liberty streets. Ugly on the outside and charming within, the Rennert was Baltimore's finest hotel. Three hundred fanatics filled the airy, elegant dining room, to fete the champions by indulging in the Rennert's oysters -- famed worldwide -- along with duck and crab croquettes and champagne.

The ballplayers, at the center table, looked less than comfortable: They had donned evening dress, which many of them had borrowed. Captain Robbie rose from his seat and raised his empty champagne flute into the air. "Glasses up," he ordered, looking around at his men -- "and now glasses down!"

Mindful of the Temple Cup Series ahead, he placed his glass upside down on the table. His teammates did the same, and the crowd hailed them.

As the bottles of champagne passed from table to table, too many of the ballplayers cast a longing glance.

The two messengers reverently carried a tin copy of the Temple Cup onto the floor of the low, domed Corn and Flour Exchange. The real Temple Cup, made of silver on an onyx base, was on display in New York. Still, the grain merchants stopped their trading for a moment and cheered. The overdecorated trophy had a fluted spout and ornately wrought handles and the embossed figure of a ballplayer ready to throw. William Temple, the urbane owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, had donated the cup for a seven-game postseason series between the pennant winners and the runners-up. The idea had come to him after Pittsburgh had finished second in 'ninety-three.

The series was to start at Union Park two days after the Orioles returned. But by then they were in no shape to play, as the players soon failed to heed Robbie's injunction at the Rennert dinner. Invitations poured in from admirers; few were turned down. The ballplayers Were wined and dined to exhaustion. "If I could only get five minutes' rest," one of the more popular Orioles was heard to complain.

Spirits, the liquid sort, was not what had thrown the series into doubt, however. It was money -- how to divide the receipts. William Temple understood what motivated men. He had allotted 65 percent of the ticket receipts (after expenses) to the winning team and 35 percent to the losers -- all of it for the ballplayers, he pointed out, and none for the owners.

To the Orioles, such proportions would not do. Temple had once been quoted -- or misquoted -- in a Pittsburgh newspaper saying that the pennant winners, not the series winners, would get 65 percent. The Orioles had spent six arduous months capturing the pennant. Why should they get so little if they lost four games? They insisted on at least an even split. Fifty-fifty was fine with the Giants: Ned Hanlon and Johnny Ward shook hands on it.

William Temple refused. He feared that a series with no incentive would prove a farce. The money must be divided as he wanted, he warned, or "Baltimore has forfeited the right to play for the cup." The ballplayers murmured about making private arangements, pairing up to split the money evenly.

When the teams took the field, nobody knew if it was for the opening of the Temple Cup Series or for an exhibition game. That was part of the reason barely ten thousand cranks showed up -- that and the ominous clouds and the decision by Baltimore's management to double the ticket prices.

John McGraw was the last holdout. Five minutes before the game was to start, Robbie and a half-dozen Orioles surrounded him fifteen feet behind the pitching rubber. The Giants' quietly spectacular third baseman, George Davis, had approached him at the Eutaw House that morning with a private offer of a fifty-fifty split. Keeler and Kelley and Gleason had agreed to the same arrangement, but Mac still refused. He broke away from the huddle and crossed to third base. As a lucrative series was on the brink of becoming a single exhibition, Robbie shot him a look of disgust that no one who saw it would ever forget.

They coaxed Mac back and just as the gong was sounding he gave in. He called George Davis over.

"That agreement goes, George," McGraw said.

"It does."

Mac invited Joe Kelley in from left field as a witness. Dirty Jack Doyle, the Giants' first baseman, came over and offered Kel the same deal. Kel said he had already paired up with Amos Rusie but would get Willie Keeler to go in with Doyle, which he did.

Robbie strode to the grandstand. "We play the series," he announced.

The Orioles batted first, against Amos Rusie. Willie Keeler poked a pitch to left field. Two batters later he was thrown out at home plate.

Then Rusie shut Baltimore down. The dampness of the day helped his grip, so he made the most of his speed. The Giants, with something to prove, played with determination. In four consecutive innings, they scored a run.

The Orioles looked sharp in black and orange, but they were listless. Nary a Baltimore runner had crossed the plate when John McGraw opened the ninth with a single past third base. Two batters later, his daring baserunning found him crossing the plate. Then Hughey Jennings hit a slow roller to third and, as everyone could see, beat the throw to first.

The umpire called him out.

The Orioles kicked and kicked, to no avail. They were certain that the umpires -- two, for such a series -- favored New York. Even a Giants coach confided his amazement.

One batsman later, the Giants had won the first game.

Clearly this series was a matchup between pitching and hitting. Every regular in Baltimore's lineup had batted better than .300 for the season. The Giants' pitchers, Rusie and Meekin, were the best pair in the League.

Yet that was not the matchup that mattered the most. One team had a reason to win. The other one -- its three best players, especially -- did not.

The tension erupted before the second game began. The Giants were warming up at Union Park as the cranks wandered around the outfield when Eddie Burke, the little left fielder, suddenly hurled a baseball as hard as he could, a witness said afterward -- at a young man's face. A hundred men and boys crowded in on the outfielder until the police drove them off.

The game had its thrills. For the Orioles some of the vigor was back. As the ninth inning started, with the score 5 to 5, the Giants' leadoff batter tapped a good-natured ground ball to Hughey Jennings. As he made ready to scoop it up, the ball struck a pebble and bounced over his head. After another Giant got on base, Eddie Burke hit an easy bounder to Hughey. The shortstop needed only to touch second base, a step away, and throw to first. But he started to move before the ball was in his hand.

A moment later another Giant cleared the bases with a triple. The Temple Cup Series suddenly stood at two games to none.

As the Giants climbed onto their horse-drawn omnibus, with its wagon wheels and open sides, Eddie Burke was nearly hit by a flying piece of brick.

More than twenty thousand New Yorkers thronged the Polo Grounds two afternoons later. Amos Rusie pitched. Neither team scored an earned run. The Orioles made more errors and lost again, 4 to 1.

The Orioles took an early lead the next afternoon. Suddenly the game became a burlesque. Joe Kelley made three errors, and the twirlers were mutton pie. The Giants ran the bases at will. The pennant winners looked like tailenders. To lose 16 to 3 -- it was humiliating.

"Baltimore's in the Cold, Cold Ground," the crowd of ten thousand sang. The Temple Cup was New York's.

Each Giant's share came to $768, each Oriole's to $360. Amos Rusie was a gentleman. Before leaving for Indiana he left $200 for Joe Kelley. The other Giants welshed. Jack Doyle denied that he and Willie Keeler had agreed to anything.

Nick Young, the League's president, assured anyone who asked that the Orioles, having won the pennant, were truly the champions. But he had to keep saying so.

Copyright © 1999 by Burt Solomon

From Chapter One: The Fields of Brooklyn

The weather in Brooklyn had been quirky since Christmas. The mercury had fallen the night before to thirteen degrees, the coldest of the winter so far, and snow had been predicted for this dying day of 1922. In its place came a heavy rain followed by hours of disarming sunshine and then a chilly wind.

"Wee Willie" Keeler, the famous old ballplayer, was propped up on pillows in his sickbed, looking wan and wasted. Though he was small, his features had been generous; now they seemed shriveled. The pain in his chest had been disabling at times, but his eyes still shone.

Charles Wuest, his doctor and friend, came by around noon. Willie invited him over for a quiet party that evening. "Well, I've got to have a New Year smoke and drink with old friends like you," Willie said. Even in illness and penury he seemed playful and kind. "I had a dream last night that we were all going to California to spend the winter."

He understood that he would never go. His brothers, Tom and Joe, and his closest friends had been told that the end was imminent. Willie had not: The patient never was. But surely he knew. No batsman had ever faced the twirlers with a keener eye.

He had already told Tom, his oldest brother, that he knew this was a fight he would lose. That night he spoke to his friends who had squeezed into his dim second-floor flat at 1010 Gates avenue. "You think that I am going to die," he said. "But I am not going to pass out this year. I am going to see the new year in."

Willie Keeler was only fifty, but what more was there to do? He had lost everything he loved when he left baseball. He had never married or fathered a child. He had been the first ballplayer to be paid $10,000 a year. Known as the Brooklyn Millionaire when he retired, now he was a pauper. At last he had found Clara, but only when it was too late.

He fell asleep as midnight neared. His guests went into the street to listen to the bells of Brooklyn, the City of Churches, ring in the new year. Willie lived in a row house with bow windows, a half-block on the wrong side of Broadway. On the other side, beyond the loud grimy el, stood the Victorian mansions of Bushwick. Willie's side was crowded with the children of immigrants -- from Russia, Austria, Germany, France, Alsace, and most of all Ireland, where his parents had been born.

All over Brooklyn, sirens and bells were sounded as 1923 arrived. An eight-year-old girl in Bushwick sat in the rear window of her home and was shot in the forehead by a rifle fired into the air. (Dr. Wuest, a coroner's physician, conducted the autopsy.) On Gates avenue, the muffled sounds of celebration penetrated inside.

Suddenly there was a sound in the sickroom. Tom, who had stayed behind, rushed to his brother's bedside. He found Willie sitting up. A smile creased Willie's face as he shook a miniature cowbell.

"You see," he said, "the new year is here and so am I -- still."

He exchanged good wishes with the others once they returned. He took a short smoke and a drink -- "really medicine for him," Dr. Wuest said later. Willie finished and said to his friends: "I'm pretty tired. I feel like taking a good, long sleep." He dozed off.

He never awakened.

Within an hour Willie Keeler had breathed his last. Dr. Wuest looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one.

On the death certificate the doctor described the cause of death as chronic endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart. Willie had suffered from it for five years. There was also a report of dropsy, an excess of fluid between the cells, the sign of a failing heart.

The reaction to his death was intense. WILLIE KEELER STRUCK OUT BY THE GREAT UMPIRE, the Brooklyn Daily Times grieved. WILLIE KEELER, GREATEST OF PLACE HITTERS, LEAVES BEHIND A BRILLIANT RECORD, ran the headline in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The Sporting News listed the records he still held. He had batted safely in forty-four consecutive games in a season. He had collected at least two hundred hits in each of eight straight seasons, and claimed to have once played an entire season without striking out. George Sisler had broken his record of 239 hits in a season only three years before. Willie's batting average of .424 back in 'ninety-seven was the second-highest ever (next to Hugh Duffy's .440), other than in 'eighty-seven, the year that four strikes made an out and bases on balls counted as hits.

Even more than his individual achievements, Willie Keeler had helped change the face of the national game. The newspapers in Baltimore mourned the passing of the first of the Big Four who had played for the celebrated Orioles a quarter-century earlier. At the time, baseball had been a game of power and thick-bodied men. Then came the Orioles, scrappy and swift. In 'ninety-four they won the first of three pennants in a row. They used the hit-and-run, the bunt, the squeeze play, the cutoff play, the Baltimore chop -- whatever was unexpected and put their opponents on edge. They never stopped thinking. Scientific baseball, it was called, or inside baseball, or -- more than occasionally -- dirty baseball.

Whatever the name, the national game would never be the same. Before Willie broke in, ballplayers customarily held the bat at the very end; he choked almost halfway up and chopped and thrust and poked at the ball. By his success, he changed what was right. In place of the slugging came speed and strategy and smarts. Even now, Ty Cobb and Rabbit Maranville were still slicing up the basepaths in the old Orioles' footsteps.

It was after Willie Keeler had returned to Brooklyn from Baltimore that a baseball scribe asked him for his secret of hitting. Willie had been thinking about it for years. "Keep your eye clear," he replied, "and hit 'em where they ain't."

He could see the rotation on the ball from the instant the pitcher released it. He had to use every advantage, for he was not much bigger than a batboy. Willie claimed to be five feet, four and one-half inches tall -- and would never consent to be measured. The others of the Big Four -- John McGraw, Hughey Jennings, and even Swaggering Joe Kelley -- were not all that much bigger. They were brainy at the bat and reckless on the basepaths and fearless in the field. Old-timers still talked of the afternoon in Washington that Willie had stuck his hand up through the barbed wire fence and prevented a home run. The great second baseman Johnny Evers, famed as a fielder himself, thought that no ballplayer had ever been a better judge of where a batter would drive a pitch.

Yet it was not only for his playing that Willie was eulogized. "The loveliest character in baseball," Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson, the catcher and captain of the old Orioles, murmured to a reporter on New Year's night. Among teammates who sharpened their spikes, Willie was known for his decency and gentlemanly demeanor.

From the start he had been amazed he was paid to do something he would have done for free. "I like playing ball so much," he once told the Orioles in their clubhouse, "I'd pay them for the privilege if that was the only way I could get into a ballpark."

Yet even while he was on the diamond, the air of innocence was fading fast. Baseball was not what it had once been. Monopoly and greed had transformed the national game and at last it touched even Willie. "I am in baseball for all I can get out of it," he explained matter-of-factly when he jumped to the American League in 1903. "In baseball, as in any profession, business prevails over sentiment."

Ever since, things had only grown worse. The Black Sox scandal, when gamblers fixed the World Series of 1919, had shown baseball as something darker than a sport. In response -- and panic -- the ball-clubs' owners had hired a tyrannical commissioner to save them from themselves. On the field the game was changing again. A borough away, a spindly legged strongman by the name of Babe Ruth was banging home runs and turning baseball into a game of sluggers again.

Nor was Brooklyn what it had been while Willie was growing up, just a dozen blocks from where he died. Brooklyn had never grown so fast. Where fields had been, now there were homes. Asphalt had replaced the cobblestones; the milk trucks no longer wakened the hard-of-hearing. A record number of new buildings had gone up in the previous year and more than a thousand miles of sewers twisted beneath its streets, instead of sixty, as just a decade before. Changes in zoning had spattered businesses among the narrow, unremitting homes. Willie had died beside a bank and over a branch office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An undertaker labored a block away.

Willie Keeler's body lay in a plain oaken coffin by the bow window. He had died on a Monday and the funeral was arranged for Thursday morning. The mourners had started to gather by Wednesday. That night, two hundred members of the Brooklyn Lodge of the Elks, No. 22, passed through Willie's rooms to say their farewells to one of the lodge's most enduring members. Thomas Burns led the hymns and prayers, then every Elk filed silently past the casket and dropped a single red rose from his lapel.

Hundreds of people waited outside in the cold. In Willie's playing days they had been called "cranks" and were now known as "fans."

It snowed overnight, seven-and-a-half inches, the heaviest of the winter so far. It was also the prettiest. A covering of white concealed the grit of the streets. The plows had been out in the night so that by morning the trolleys could pass. In a full-page advertisement on page 12 of the Eagle, Abraham & Straus cajoled:

PUT RUBBERS

"WHERE THEY AIN'T"

AS "WEE WILLIE" KEELER WOULD SAY.

ANYBODY WHO WAS CAUGHT THIS MORNING

WITHOUT RUBBERS OR ARCTICS

WAS "OUT OF LUCK."

Several hundred people gathered again in the morning on Gates avenue and stood with their heads bared in the sun. Police reserves from the Ralph avenue station stood nearby.

Inside the tan brick house with the chocolate-colored cornice and the ornamental trim, the manager of the world champion New York Giants, one of the most celebrated men in America, stood by the open casket and stared at the face of his friend. John McGraw had known Willie Keeler for twenty-nine years. They had batted one-two in the Orioles' lineup. How many hundreds of times had Willie moved Mac along a base or more? They had wrestled with each other, the two bantams rolling around in the dirt. They had sat side by side at the vaudeville show and in church. After five glorious years as teammates they played on rival teams, then in rival leagues. When Willie's playing days were just about done, Mac hired him as a pinch hitter and a coach.

He gazed down on the casket for five minutes, which seemed an eternity. Mac was white-haired now. Once he had been the scrawny and fiery soul of a team. Now he was the Little Napoleon, stocky and imperious, who could never admit to a doubt that he was right. How he had changed from when they were young.

Willie had not changed. To be sure, he had compromised with the ways of the world. He had allowed his innocence to turn into something else. But he had never really changed.

Only now he was dead.

McGraw started to weep. The Eagle said he broke down. He wailed so loudly, the Keeler family recounted later, that Joe Kelley -- always spoiling for a fight -- barged in from a room away and threw him out.

Other ex-Orioles had come to pay their respects -- Hughey Jennings and Steve Brodie and Kid Gleason and Jack Doyle and the man at the center of the team, their brilliant strategist of a manager, Ned Hanlon. Every year the old teammates still gathered for a reunion. Usually they went to Baltimore, but recently they had been coming to New York, so that Willie could attend.

Now they had learned, on a side street in Brooklyn, that the bonds between them would last until death.

The flowers kept arriving, as they had all night. Colonel Jacob Ruppert and Colonel T. L. Huston, the owners of the Yankees, sent an enormous cluster of roses and pink carnations. A casket bouquet came from the Giants -- the first big league ballclub Willie had played for, and the last. Flowers arrived from almost every major league club and from the leaders of the national game and from celebrated players of yore. It took two open motorcars to carry them all the four blocks to the church.

The motorcars preceded the hearse, with its wide windows, the white curtains drawn. Joe and Sarah Keeler and their three children filled the first carriage in the cortege. Tom and Annie Keeler took the second. McGraw shared the third carriage with Hughey Jennings, now his assistant manager, and with Wid Conroy, who had roomed with Willie on the road when they were Yankees -- the Highlanders then. Nine more automobiles carried Willie's friends. The crowd walked behind the procession, all the way to the church.

The neighborhood grew fancy. The row houses widened and had staircases with wrought-iron railings. The Gothic spire of the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel, on Putnam avenue between Patchen and Ralph, rose like a guardian angel over a neighborhood in no evident need of one. Snow covered the steps of the brooding gray church; ice encased the bower of branches that wreathed the Crusader-arched doorway.

Inside, the rows of stone pillars soared toward gilded arches at the vaulted ceiling. Painted saints graced the cream-colored walls between the stained-glass windows made in Munich.

Hundreds of worshipers crowded inside. Charley Ebbets, the president of the Brooklyn ballclub, was traveling in Europe, and Wilbert Robinson, the portly Uncle Robbie, was at his winter home in Georgia (disappointing local sportswriters, who hoped to ask about the rumors of a trade). But many others had come. Charley Ebbets, Jr., and Ed McKeever represented the Brooklyn club. National League president John Heydler, concessionaire Harry Stevens, and Pat Powers, who had started Willie in the big leagues, sat in the pews. So did Abe Yager of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Joe Vila of the New York Sun and John B. Foster of Sporting Life, the expired weekly -- the newspapermen who had become Willie's friends.

The ushers wore tuxedos. Father Donahue, in his fiddleback vestments, stood with his back to the mourners. He and two assistant priests conducted the requiem Mass.

A smaller crowd gathered again shortly before noon at Calvary Cemetery, just into Queens. Snow shrouded the hillside. Willie's father had purchased the plot when Willie was three years old, to bury a baby daughter and later a two-year-old son. He had come here again to bury his beloved wife. For the past eleven years he had rested beside her, facing east across the quiet landscape, toward Ireland.

Now Willie, sweet Willie, would join them. Three tender pink roses gently rested on his casket, and John McGraw and Hughey Jennings and Wid Conroy each tossed on a spadeful of earth as it was lowered into the ground. Tears came to their eyes, not only for a teammate but for a time.

It snowed fiercely on the first Saturday of March in eighteen seventy-two. The ferry boats found it hard to cross the East River from Manhattan island and they had to rely on the clanging of the bells more than on the lights to guide them into the docks of Brooklyn. The passengers huddled together for warmth, barely able to see the massive gray stone tower rising out of the water by the far Brooklyn shore. It was to be three times the height it was now, the loftiest thing on the horizon, to hold the grand unearthly bridge that would forever change Brooklyn.

The sun rose clear and bright the next morning, on the Sabbath, the third of March. Along the sunny side of Brooklyn's streets, the snow turned to slush. At the Plymouth Church, in the eminence of Brooklyn Heights, the lionlike Henry Ward Beecher shook his iron-gray mane, taking pains not to castigate sin so harshly as to discomfit the sinner. Even in Brooklyn, he roared in his nasal twang, wealth was becoming the measure of success.

Still, Brooklyn was nothing like New York, across the East River, where the incumbent mayor, a Tammany Hall man, was facing a jury and Boss Tweed was nine months away from being arrested. In New York, people lived in dark and crowded quarters, and murders had become unremarkable. Not in Brooklyn. It was the fourth most populous city in the nation, and just a ferry ride away from the largest. Yet the air felt fresh and the streets were calm and a man might gain title to a home of his own.

Pat Keleher had managed to do so, at 376 Pulaski street, at the edge of the Bedford section of Brooklyn. That was three years ago. Now he had something else to celebrate. His wife, Mary, gave birth this day to their third child, their third son. They named him William, which was Pat's Christian name.

Pat had arrived from Ireland a dozen years before, carrying the family name of O'Kelleher. As a boy he had worked on a farm in County Cork, until the absentee landlords had mismanaged the country's rich soil into ruin. At the age of twenty-six, still too poor to marry, Pat had walked the twenty miles over Watergrass Hill and down to the ocean. His shoes dangled from around his neck, to save the soles for when he reached his new home.

Pat was not one of the garrulous, talkative Irishmen, but a guttural sort, a compact man who spoke in grunts. His chin was strong and his skull looked squat, as if flattened by the weight of the world. Yet he had a wicked sense of humor. His eyes had a spark -- a pugnaciousness -- that lit up his face. He looked every inch the Irishman.

This was not bound to help his prospects in his new homeland. Even in Brooklyn, so heavy with immigrants, in many a workplace the Irish need not apply. The newspaper advertisements specified Protestant girls for housework.

But Pat was determined. In this blunt land of liberty, he was quick to make his way. He dropped the O' from his name and found a job, quite a good one, driving the horse-drawn trolleys that ran along DeKalb avenue. He took a wife, Mary Kiley, who had come from Ireland the same time he did. They saved every cent, and when they had accumulated $700 they bought a house. It was not much to look at -- little more than a narrow two-story shack, with monotonous shingles and a tiny front porch. The slit of a doorway was sheltered by a desiccated porch roof resting on rococo joists, which were meant to show luxury but suggested the reverse. The only lighthearted touch was a white picket fence that protected a front yard barely spacious enough for a newborn. Still, it was theirs -- Pat's and Mary's and little Tom's and then Joe's and now Willie's. Already Pat owned more than he could have imagined in the despairing land of his birth. Almost everyone else on the block between Lewis and Stuyvesant avenues rented.

He loved working for the trolley. The horse-drawn lines fanned out across the city of Brooklyn like splayed fingers. The DeKalb Avenue Railroad Company, an independent line, carried passengers east to Broadway and beyond, all the way to Coney Island. But it was forbidden to run its cars on the direct route to Fulton Ferry or to City Hall, because the City Railroad Company, by virtue of its influence in Albany, had been granted the rights to the public thoroughfares. "The power of this impudent monopoly," the Eagle wailed.

Pat had known since Ireland not to count on anyone else for his survival. He started a modest moving business on the side and bought a plot of land farther out in Brooklyn on which he raised a few cows and a couple of goats. The cow's milk he sold and the goat's milk he drank, though he never learned to like it.

"You never put out any garbage," the garbage collector told him one day.

"We ates it," Pat replied.

For Willie and his older brothers and every boy they knew, Brooklyn was a wonderful place to grow up. There were frogs to catch and snakes to put out of their misery. In every direction from Pulaski street lay open fields. Directly across the street, at the five-story brick buildings of H. B. Scharmann & Sons Brewery, the boys could steal past the vigilant watchman, into the imposing entranceway, to snatch handfuls of sweet malt from the end of the chute. Or they watched the husky men rolling the hogsheads up and down the street, back and forth across the cobblestones, to distribute the resin evenly inside.

Copyright © 1999 by Burt Solomon

From Chapter Three: Foxy Ned

Ned Hanlon was only thirty-four but he was big-time -- a name. He had made a national reputation as the captain of the All-Americas team that Johnny Ward had managed and had become his right-hand man in the Players' League. Then, reinstated to the good graces of the National League, he had become the player-manager in Pittsburgh, until his hard-drinking teammates rebelled at his discipline the summer before. He kept playing center field, and not badly, until he slipped on a concrete walkway while chasing a fly ball in practice that spring and strained a tendon in his leg.

In other words, he was available.

Harry von der Horst liked the idea from the first. It appealed to the self-conscious boldness in him. He also saw the benefits. Undoubtedly the Orioles could use some discipline. Harry could use some too, of course, though he was less willing to acknowledge that, even to himself.

He asked the owners in Pittsburgh for permission to talk to Hanlon. They jumped at the chance to unload the aging star's $5,000 salary.

The Orioles were playing the Colts in Chicago when Hanlon met with Harry von der Horst and Jack Waltz at the Tremont House, at Lake and Dearborn. In the ornate building roofed with mansard crowns, Hanlon looked out of place. Physically he was less than imposing, his meek pompadour, flat cheeks, and handlebar moustache curled to perfection suggesting the countenance of a slightly bored bank clerk. His expression was bland; whatever he was feeling, he concealed. Sober in demeanor and spare with his words, he seemed to back away from the camera whenever he sat for a photograph. "Silent Ned," he was called.

Edward Hugh Hanlon was the son of a housebuilder in Montville, Connecticut, not far from New London. He had wanted to be a ballplayer since age ten, and he quit school at sixteen to pitch for the Norwich Arctics and then the New London Stars. But he was not joyful about it. That was not his way. He was determined, meticulous, assiduous -- steely, more often than not. His Yankee reticence made other men want to please him. He seemed not to care what anyone thought of him and that was his strength, the quality that made him a natural leader. There was an apartness about him that lent him an air of mystery -- and command. He was known to his intimates as Edward and to his ballplayers as Ed. To everyone else he was Ned.

He was a hard man to warm to, but there was plenty to admire. For one thing, he got the most out of what he had. He had never been the most dangerous of batsmen. What God had given him, he knew, would not suffice. So he was aggressive on the basepaths and graceful and swift in the outfield -- and always, he used his head. He made singles into doubles and doubles into triples by watching the flick of an outfielder's wrist. He studied every opponent's habits and flaws. He seemed to notice everything and remember it all, at just the right instant. Above all, he was a man of precision and logic. At home he had a clock in every room. He was the sort who saw the pattern in the details, then found a way to rearrange them. Ned Hanlon was as smart in his own way as Edison, except that Edison was a show-off.

To a show-off like Harry von der Horst, Hanlon's understated air of assurance was bound to be impressive. How badly Harry wanted a winning team. He had gone far too many years without one. He was tired of losing money and having to fight with his father for every dollar. In Ned Hanlon, so comfortingly self-effacing, Harry could glimpse the prospect of some success at long last. It was a gamble, hiring a manager who would not be pushed around as if he was a beer salesman. But it was a chance Harry was willing to take. Harry was confident that he could push anyone around, with the exception of his father.

Hanlon understood how much Harry wanted him and turned it to his advantage. He insisted that he be given full authority to run the ballclub, including the signing and releasing of players. Harry agreed. Maybe he was secretly relieved to be rid of the responsibility.

The three men emerged from Harry's hotel room with a contract, which carried the crisp signature of Edward H. Hanlon.

The new manager was careful to lower the expectations among the newspapermen who had gathered. "A club that is demoralized by losses cannot be reorganized in a day or a week," he said, "but it can be steadily improved until the players are doing all that is possible for them to do."

The Orioles' players met Hanlon in Cincinnati four days later. The ballplayers knew that changes had to be made and could be forgiven for feeling apprehensive. Harry von der Horst introduced their somber new manager and sketched the scope of his powers. Hanlon, he said, would have charge of them on and off the field. From whatever he decreed, there would be no appeal.

Then Hanlon said a few words. Man by man, he assured them, the Orioles were one of the best teams in the land. If they worked as a unit and cared nothing for their individual glory, surely they could win more than half of their games for the rest of the season.

He insisted that the players never give up until the last man was out and that they play not only with their hands and feet but also with their heads. In a business sense, he told them, they and the ballclub were partners. Their remuneration would depend upon their efficiency.

"United we stand," he implored a team that was a collection of individuals, "and divided we fall." None of the players, he promised, would be released without a fair trial.

He had said the same thing, they remembered, on the day he was hired and had immediately sent home Pete Gilbert, the porous third baseman who was feeble at the bat. The lushers and the loafers were soon to be sent away. Still the Orioles would remain mired in twelfth place, the laughingstock of the League. The first baseman beat up the second baseman in a midseason fistfight. Sadie McMahon, the hard-throwing right-hander, went on a drunk on a day he was supposed to pitch, then he cursed Hanlon and Harry when he turned up. Another twirler, incensed about a cut in his pay, showed up soused and unable to pitch. Hanlon suspended them both.

The Orioles won barely a third of their remaining games. For the season they had by far the sorriest record in the National League, losing more than a hundred games. Of the seventeen players on the team when Hanlon arrived, he determined to keep just three.

One was Sadie McMahon, whose Christian name was John. He had acquired his nickname when a teammate called out to a girl on a street corner he shared and he answered instead, and he was sufficiently sure of himself to enjoy the ribbing he took forever after. He had a potbelly but was a man's man, with a bulldog face and his short blond hair brushed straight up. Indeed, he had apparently murdered a man four years before, at the circus grounds in Wilmington, Delaware, his hometown. He had been the twirler for a local ballclub and one of a dozen Irish-American toughs who had ambled up to Carmine Malascalza's peanut and fruit stand and started to help themselves. When the Italian immigrant and his brother protested, a strong blond roughneck punched Carmine and knocked him to the ground. When he was getting up, the same fellow, ten feet away, hurled a rock as hard as he could, and it crushed the side of the immigrant's skull.

The dead man's brother identified the assailant as John McMahon.

At the murder trial the victim's brother, testifying through an interpreter, was certain. Then came three English-speaking witnesses who remembered the Malascalza brothers as the assailants and who had no recollection of the twirler being closer than 200 yards away. When they were finished even the prosecutor asked for an acquittal. The crowd of spectators applauded, and the jury complied.

But if the rough right-hander lost control of himself off the ball-field, in the pitcher's box he was unshakable. He was stocky but his movements were easy and graceful. His pitches went where he wanted them to go. Later he claimed never to have been knocked out of the box or to have issued an intentional base on balls. He was nervy; the more urgent the circumstance, the better he pitched. He had command of his shoots -- his speediest pitches -- and his curves and his changes of pace and his own version of an overhand drop ball. He thrived on work. He had won thirty-six games back in 'ninety and thirty-five in 'ninety-one.

McMahon had come to the Orioles in 'ninety after the Philadelphia Athletics of the old American Association had gone bankrupt, as half of what the newspapers dubbed the "Dumpling Battery." The other half, catcher Wilbert Robinson, was known universally as Robbie. He was portly and perennially cheerful, even in the most trying of times. "Come, boys, ginger up!" he would jolly his teammates along. The son of the town butcher in Hudson, Massachusetts, Robinson had married early and fathered two sons and stepfathered two daughters. He had a natural dignity about him, a settledness that calmed the pitchers he caught. He was unafraid of hard work; during practices, he was ordinarily the heaviest man on the field (all 215 pounds of him) but the last to leave it. When the ballplayers circled the ballgrounds, Robbie ran in front.

He was not the most reliable of hitters: He had batted just .216 in 'ninety-one and had never broken .250. Yet he was dangerous with a bat in his hands. A month after Hanlon took over, in a game against the St. Louis Browns, Robbie hit six singles and a double in seven times at bat. It was a record for batsmen that would stand unequalled for eighty-three years.

Behind home plate Robbie was a veritable brick wall. He had a strong arm and proved something of a pioneer. With the Athletics he had been among the first catchers to signal the pitcher, instead of the other way around, and thus he was among the first to move up and squat close to the batter -- even with no opponent on base -- so that his signals might be seen. Everyone said how reckless he was, and injuries cost him dozens of games each year.

Only one other Oriole met Ned Hanlon's specifications, and he was as different from McMahon and Robbie -- and Hanlon -- as anyone could be. John J. McGraw was a scrawny hothead who had just turned nineteen and looked two or three years younger. He was the littlest man on the team but the fiercest. He had left his home in Truxton, New York, at age twelve after his mother and four of his siblings had died of diphtheria and his father had beaten him once too often. His face, in rare repose, was as lean and taut as a panther's. He was a force of nature.

He had joined the Orioles the season before. One day he was sitting on the bench when a brawny tobacco-chewing veteran shifted his hips so that McGraw fell off. The ballplayers laughed and then looked on in amazement as the five-foot-seven-inch rookie lunged at his tormentor with his fists and his spikes. He was reaching for a bat when his new teammates pinned his arms until he calmed down.

"You'll do, kid," said a teammate who had never talked to him before.

McGraw played baseball the same way. It was never a game to him. It was life and death. When the gong sounded, all that mattered was winning. The fastest pitching never backed him away from the plate. He slid into bases headfirst. Nothing scared him. "A ballgame -- any ballgame -- was something to fight for," he believed. He would say anything or do anything to win.

That included showing self-control, if that meant an advantage. Rarely did McGraw swing at a bad pitch. His patience brought him better pitches and more bases on balls. His mastery at fouling off pitches had fueled talk about changing the rules to count the first two fouls as strikes. As a left-handed batter he had learned as a boy to avoid his father's wrath at his breaking church windows in right-center field by hitting to the opposite field. He mainly played shortstop and was sharp in the field.

Hanlon saw that McGraw's value to the Orioles came less from his agility than from his intensity. He never let up and he had contempt for anyone who did. John McGraw could drive his teammates to another level of play. So he was to serve as the soul of a team that was about to be born.

By the closing days of the 'ninety-two season it was obvious to Ned Hanlon that George Van Haltren had to go. The hard-hitting young center fielder had started the season as the manager, before Harry's beer salesman took his place. He had been fired after the Orioles had forfeited a game because he had neglected to tell the umpire they would have to leave early to catch their train. Now his playing had lost its edge. He lost tight ballgames by dropping lazy fly balls or foolishly getting thrown out at third base. As Hanlon knew from personal experience, it was hard to be the manager and then not to be.

Hanlon made a deal with his old ballclub. In exchange for Van Haltren, who was batting .302, Pittsburgh gave the Orioles $2,000 and -- at Hanlon's behest -- a weak-hitting young outfielder named Joe Kelly. "I had my eye on Kelly for a long time," Hanlon explained to a scribe. "I think it is better to have a good, steady ballplayer than to have a great player who, for some reason, does not play as well as he should."

Not everyone saw steadiness in Joe Kelly. He was twenty years old and handsome as hell. He was an inch short of six feet and looked bigger. He was powerfully built, and his broad face had a cleft chin and surprisingly delicate features, topped by dirty blond hair that was parted in the middle and plastered to his head. He had a gift for repartee. The ladies loved him, almost as much as he loved himself.

Kel had gone through the parochial schools of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and learned to play baseball in the public parks around Boston. He was as fast as he was strong and could run like a sharp breeze in the outfield. He was aggressive at the bat and daring on the basepaths. Hanlon liked that. On the rare occasions he hit the ball, it kept going. Hanlon saw a ballplayer with power and a compulsion to win, who needed only to be taught the fundamentals.

Hanlon learned right away that Joe Kelly had another compulsion -- to have his own way. The young outfielder refused at first to sign a contract, for fear that the last-place Orioles were not long for the League. Then he said he would sign but that first he needed to go home for a few days. He went home and stayed, until Hanlon persuaded him to sign.

It was not long before the Baltimore sportswriters paid the robust new fellow a compliment: They added an "e" to his surname. "Kelly" was shanty Irish, but "Kelley" -- that was lace-curtain Irish. The higher status suited him, and Joe Kelley he would be.

Hanlon made Kelley his project in 'ninety-three. Every morning at eight o'clock he dragged the youngster to Union Park to work on his fielding and to learn the finer points of hitting and bunting.

For Hanlon, acquiring Kelley was just the first step, but it would be no easy thing to remake a team without money. The $2,000 from the Van Haltren deal would not be enough, and Harry yon der Horst had no money to speak of -- his father had made sure of it. Maybe ticket receipts would grow, but not until the ballclub improved. So how could Hanlon afford to improve the club without selling more tickets?

He would have to be clever. Hanlon looked for smart young ballplayers he could get on the cheap, with qualities that everyone else had overlooked. He had insisted on full authority when he was hired, but whether he would have it was something else. No matter what Harry von der Horst had promised, almost every owner sought to meddle from time to time. Why else be an owner?

Hanlon saw a solution to all of the problems at once.

It happened that he had amassed some money of his own. He had invested his salary in Pittsburgh real estate and then sold it, along with his $3,000 of stock in the Pirates. He and Harry struck a deal. Hanlon loaned $7,000 to the club in exchange for a quarter of the stock in the Orioles -- and full control over the team. He would have a free hand.

When the Orioles' directors met in March of 'ninety-three, they elected Ned Hanlon as the ballclub's president. Harry von der Horst, at his own request, was made the treasurer. Soon he was sporting a button that instructed anyone who approached him with a question: ASK HANLON.

From now on it would be Hanlon's job to summon up the answers.

The horse carriages were lined up outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was one of the classiest, priciest hotels in New York. Situated at the corner of Twenty-third street and Fifth avenue, the hotel faced Madison Square. Its white marble facade and Greek-columned entranceways insinuated the weight of a bank. For years it had served as the city's Republican headquarters, and the National League magnates had made it their own. It was everything they aspired to be.

They were to convene in Parlor F at noon, on the seventh of March in 'ninety-three. What with all the private buttonholing and corner lobbying, it was two o'clock before Nick Young, the League's mild-mannered president, managed to herd a quorum of owners into the grand gilded chamber on the second floor. At three-thirty they recessed for lunch.

It was past four when they gathered again, to take up the most consequential issue they faced.

Amos Rusie was considered to have been the proximate reason for action. It was not only him, however. Other hard-throwing pitchers overwhelmed the batsmen from so close in. Batting averages had been dropping all over the League, by as many as ten points from season to season, to a woeful .245 in 'ninety-two. That caused havoc at the turnstiles. It was hitting and scoring, after all, that drew the customers in. Nothing drove them off to vaudeville or the racetrack or the pool hall faster than quiet bats.

Nobody was surprised that Charley Byrne, the league's leading politician -- the Napoleon of Baseball, he enjoyed being called -- was in the forefront. To the Brooklyn owner, anything that stymied Amos Rusie and the Giants was to the good. It might even entice a few rooters across the bridge from New York. Byrne's proposed solution had a geometric appeal, the notion of moving the pitcher to the precise center of the diamond. That would put him eight feet farther from the batter, at a distance of sixty-three feet and six inches. Byrne and Harry von der Horst and the other member of the Playing Rules Committee also suggested replacing the pitcher's box with a slab of white rubber, to give the twirler less room to roam.

Some of the magnates saw these changes as too drastic. Frank Robison of Cleveland was the most antagonistic. His reason was simple: Denton True Young, the rawboned Ohio farmboy whose teammates had nicknamed "Cy" -- short for "Cyclone." The closer to the quaking batsman the big young right-hander stood, the more the Cleveland owner liked it. Robison growled that Byrne would move the pitcher back to second base if he could.

Behind locked doors, amid the chandeliers and velvet, the owners argued. All of them were used to getting their way. Half of them liked the idea of moving the pitcher back eight feet and half opposed it. Soon a compromise appeared, as foreseen from the first. Why not move the pitcher back five feet instead of eight?

It was almost nine o'clock that night before the question was put to a vote. It passed 11 to 1. Frank Robison voted alone.

Sixty feet and six inches from the closest corner of the diamond-shaped plate -- that was the new distance. No longer would the pitcher start anywhere he liked along the back edge of the pitcher's box. Instead he would be confined to the foot-wide pitcher's rubber, five feet farther from the batsman than before.

The owners flung open the doors of the parlor and invited the waiting newspapermen and ballplayers in. Not everyone was impressed with what they had done. "The change will not materially advantage the batsmen or lessen the speed of the pitching," the baseball statesman Henry Chadwick, the august sporting editor of the Eagle and the inventor of the box score, prophesied in print the next afternoon. The Sporting News predicted that the change "will possibly have the effect of increasing batting for a month or so after the season begins."

They were laughably wrong. Baseball would never be the same.

As the 'ninety-three season got under way, Hanlon continued to rebuild the Orioles. Over the winter an old friend had suggested two swell prospects he had spotted in the California League. Hanlon invited them east. Henny Reitz was a second baseman who was short and squat and silent, but lightning fast with his hands. "He'd say maybe three sentences a season, but all of them funny," a teammate said of him. Bill Clarke was a slender catcher with sunken cheeks and a spectral look. Hanlon was happy with both of them, in the ledger and on the diamond alike.

In June the wretched Louisville Colonels, on their way to an eleventh-place finish, came to Union Park. They had a beanpole of a first baseman, Harry Taylor, who smacked a multitude of singles and wanted to play near his home in the East. Hanlon offered to buy him, but the Colonels declined. They wanted a player in exchange, and a good one -- Voiceless Tim O'Rourke, Baltimore's quiet shortstop, who was batting .363.

Ridiculous, Hanlon replied. Unless, perhaps, the Colonels wanted to throw in that sickly shortstop of theirs.

Hughey Jennings had been suffering from malaria and had batted .136 when he was able to play, and his freckled face and startlingly red hair looked sallow. Hughey was twenty-four but seemed younger. He looked even skinnier than usual and somehow shorter than five feet, eight-and-a-half inches. He was in his third year with Louisville and was popular with the local cranks -- because he tried so hard, not because he played so well. He had a habit of bailing out whenever a pitch came inside. The twirlers knew that and pitched as any sane man would -- high and tight.

The Colonels gave him up.

Hanlon had seen something more in him. Beneath the sunny disposition and the pall of illness, there was a drive to Hughey Jennings, a desperation to succeed. Hanlon figured that Jennings's flaws at the bat could be repaired; it was his brilliance in the field that revealed the kind of player he was. He lunged at the rope of a liner, dove for the hard ground ball.

Hughey Jennings had grown up, the ninth of twelve children, in the worn hills outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. His Irish-born father was a coal miner and too many of Hughey's eight brothers were miners as well. Hughey had left school when he was twelve to work as a breaker boy, sorting out the slate as the coal slid down the chutes. It was dangerous work for a boy, even for a man. Then for three years he drove a mule car deep underground. His grin had marked him from boyhood, but he was fast becoming a man before his time.

He wanted more and dreamed of being a lawyer. Baseball was what he did after work. Hughey had never been strong, but he was wiry and tough; by nature he was competitive and high-strung. Hoping to strengthen his arm, he baked it in a brickyard kiln. Soon he was making five dollars on Sunday, playing semipro ball. He joined an amateur nine in Lehighton and then a minor league team in Allentown before the Colonels signed him as a catcher in 'ninety-one. They gave him a uniform that fit his ascetic frame like a pillowcase.

To Hughey, it beat working underground.

Baseball was always a game to him. There was a tilt to his gaze; he perpetually seemed a little surprised. He was uncomplaining and persistent. He smiled, but he never let up. The previous winter he had taken a commercial course at a business college in Scranton. He could not help but try his damndest. "A ballplayer, to be successful," he understood, "must devote his time to his work. He must breathe baseball, eat baseball, play baseball, think baseball and sleep baseball."

The day after the swap between Baltimore and Louisville was announced, but before the players switched teams, Hughey made one of the most phenomenal stops ever seen on a Baltimore ballfield. In the fifth inning Wilbert Robinson scorched a pitch over second base. Hughey, playing shortstop, threw himself in front of the ball and, while lying on his back, snapped it between his legs to first base.

He practiced with the Orioles once he joined the ballclub. But for week after week he was sick, then Hanlon kept him out of games, so he could get his proper training. It was Hanlon's way. He would let the men mingle in practice, as he watched the newcomer and listened for the other players' spontaneous remarks. Even if the spectators clamored for the new man to be put in, Hanlon would resist, until he was sure that the men would work as one.

Hanlon arranged and rearranged -- in his mind and on the diamond -- until the chemistry felt just right. He imagined using Henny Reitz at second base and Hughey Jennings at shortstop and shifting John McGraw from shortstop to third. He liked the idea.

The outfield, however, was feeble, other than Joe Kelley, who was batting around .300. Hanlon had his eye on a flashy center fielder with the Browns. Walter Scott Brodie, a proud Virginian, the son of a Confederate cavalry officer, was known to his teammates as Steve, after the famous bartender on the Bowery who had leaped from the Brooklyn Bridge and survived (though there was a school of thought that he had flung a dummy over). The ballplaying Steve Brodie was every bit as gymnastic -- and reckless. He was impressively intuitive in the field; at the crack of the bat, he would turn his back and rush to the spot where the ball would land before it did. His huge hands would gather it in.

Hanlon liked his hustle and his pluck. Not since 'ninety-one had Brodie missed a game. But at the bat his success depended on which week it was. Not that there was anything predictable, except that since he had started in the League in 'ninety, every season his average had fallen -- until this year. What he was doing differently no one could say, and Hanlon knew enough not to ask. Surely it was not because Brodie had grown less eccentric. He still conducted soliloquies in center field. When he muffed a fly ball he would scream at himself and pound his head with his fist. During practices he would catch fly balls with his back to the plate.

He was quick to drive his managers to distraction. In St. Louis the owner and the manager were nearly as dissatisfied with Brodie as he was with them.

Hanlon bought him cheaply.

In Ned Hanlon's mind a plan was taking shape. "I decided early in the game that there was money to be made in baseball if it was studied seriously," he said years later, "and after I took hold of the Orioles I often got out of bed in the night to jot down a play that might be worked out."

The 'ninety-three season, coming to a close, was not quite as disappointing as 'ninety-two had been. Still, the Orioles, mired in eighth place, had little to lose. Hanlon started working out some new plays he had been thinking about for years. Even in his playing days on the Detroit Wolverines, heavy with sluggers, Hanlon had studied bunting and place-hitting -- known as "sissy" tactics, seldom practiced. The older and larger men had scoffed at him for not hitting the ball as hard as he could. But he had held his own.

Others had tried before him. In the mid-'eighties King Kelly had employed the hit-and-run play. The run-and-hit is what it was. The runner on first base would bluff a steal of second, to see which infielder was going to take the throw. Subsequently the runner would go and the batter would poke the ball through the place the infielder had abandoned.

King Kelly taught it to the Beaneaters after he was sold to Boston. Frank Selee, Boston's easygoing manager, had a keen strategic mind and adopted the hit-and-run and had his players master the intricate teamwork of the double steal. He shifted his infielders pitch by pitch and devised the double play that went from the first baseman to the shortstop and back again. The Beaneaters were known to win games with twice as many runs as hits. Relying on speed and tactics, the Beaneaters dashed to their third consecutive pennant in 'ninety-three.

Baltimore was an even more promising place than Boston for a scampering style of baseball. Compared with the South End Grounds, with its close fences in left and right field, Union Park went on and on. The fence in right field stood 335 feet from home plate, and in center field an impossible 393 feet away, beyond the flagpole. There was plenty of space for a ball to squirt away or sneak past.

Hanlon had started to understand something else -- the significance of the new pitching distance. Putting the twirler five feet farther away shifted the balance of things. The curveball became harder to control. The batter got another instant to react to the pitch, which had slowed ever so slightly by the time it arrived, and he had a molecule of additional control over how he handled it. Batting averages across the League leapt by thirty-five percentage points, to .280, in 'ninety-three, and the strikeouts dropped almost by half. The extra distance gave a runner a better jump to steal a base, and the hit-and-run another instant to succeed. More balls were put into play, so the quickness and the range of the fielders counted for more. A pitcher needed an extra moment to field a bunt. Being confined to the rubber gave him less room to maneuver. Raw power was giving way, at least a little, to cunning. More than ever before, headwork won ballgames.

"Scientific baseball," the newspapermen called it. And was this not the age of science? The newspapers were crammed with advertisements for modern cures, such as an electric belt to cure impotence and Carter's Little Liver Pills to relieve dyspepsia, torpid liver, and other maladies, and so-called nerve seeds that came "with a written guarantee to cure all nervous diseases, such as Weak Memory, Loss of Brain Power, Headache, Wakefulness, Lost Manhood, Nightly Emissions, Quickness, Evil Dreams, Lack of Confidence." Science was becoming America's new common faith. Progress was relentless. All it required was a man who questioned an assumption or explored an unexamined possibility or noticed something that everyone else had missed. There was nothing that a man with a brain and a will to succeed and a supply of capital could not accomplish.

When it came to science, inventions, and progress, Baltimore could hold its head high. The first telegraph message -- "What hath God wrought" -- which Samuel Morse had tapped out at the Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol Building in Washington was received at a Baltimore & Ohio station out Pratt street in Baltimore. The city had seen the first umbrella manufacturing and the earliest use of illuminating gas and the first ice cream factory. The linotype machine had been invented in Baltimore and, just recently, so had the crown cork stopper that made it practical to bottle beer.

Hanlon saw that science had a place in baseball. "The game, like all things, has progressed, and it is today more scientific," he came to explain. "It is in some respects like checkers and chess, and must be played upon systematic plans. Modern baseball, as played by the Baltimores, is based upon the idea to keep opposing teams guessing. It is a case of dealing out uncertainties at all times. Against some teams the Baltimores adopt one style of play -- against others they shift. They study the weak points of all teams and try to take advantage of those points accordingly."

Such clarity, however, was yet to come. Hanlon was still groping. He was trying tactics and discarding them. He was scrutinizing what worked and what failed. He was testing opponents' reactions. He was pondering the players he owned and what they could do.

Only after he struck one more deal would the patterns fall into place.

It was Big Dan Brouthers, the Brooklyn first baseman, that Hanlon had in mind. They had known each other for years, since their days as teammates in Detroit, where Brouthers had been a quarter of the famed Big Four, and they had worked shoulder to shoulder in the Brotherhood. Hanlon knew that the outsized first baseman might have just a year left in him. He was thirty-five now and his bulk -- six-foot-two, more than 200 pounds -- was not as firm as it had been.

Big Dan was a slugger of the old school. He had batted over .300 for the past thirteen seasons. Five times he had been the champion batsman and twice he had led in home runs (with eight and eleven). Ballparks all over the League had marked the landing places of his monumental four-baggers.

None of that, really, was what Hanlon was after. Brouthers was too old to be counted on to play his best. Hanlon wanted him more as a source of stability. His broad unemotional face, his slashing moustache, his legs like cannons upended, his air of assurance, his wife and four children, a big man's magnanimity toward smaller creatures -- a team of youngsters needed someone to look up to.

Hanlon approached Charley Byrne. He suggested a trade of Brouthers for George Treadway. The Orioles' right fielder was a pretty good batsman and had the best throwing arm of any outfielder in the League, but Hanlon had a cold and calculating reason for offering him up. Treadway's dark complexion had prompted the word to spread around Baltimore that he was a black man. The ballplayers said he was, and the cranks would not let him alone. What a southern city it was in that regard. He was jeered at, until the strain made its mark and his batting fell off. Hanlon wanted him gone.

Byrne was interested, and he was happy to unload Brouthers, known for his devotion to the bottle. But what Brooklyn really needed was a third baseman. With McGraw to be moved to third base, the Orioles had one to spare. Billy Shindle was a fair hitter and a tolerably good fielder. He owned a business in Philadelphia and for two seasons had sought to gain his release. He had even been talking of quitting the game.

Byrne insisted on Treadway and Shindle for Brouthers.

Hanlon refused. He wanted man for man.

Johnny Ward had recommended a ballplayer to Hanlon, the little fellow, Willie Keeler. Brooklyn had "loaned" him to Binghamton and planned to release him. Hanlon had seen something in the 130-pound infielder. But he later acknowledged that even he had not seen all that was there.

Two days before 'ninety-three came to a close, the four-man trade was made.

Charley Byrne assured himself that he had gotten the better of the deal. He was wrong. It was for good reason that Hanlon was coming to be known as "Foxy Ned."

Willie Keeler trudged in from right field on the hard scraggly spring-practice ballgrounds in Macon, Georgia, and flung down his glove. He plopped down on the bench with an angry hummingbird's force.

"What's the matter?" Hanlon demanded.

"I'm not going to play the outfield," Willie snapped.

"Why not? What's the matter with the outfield?" Hanlon, having no patience with the inefficiency of a left-handed third baseman, had put Willie in right field instead. Willie had been unenthusiastic and had taken no pains to hide it. Every time a fly ball had come anywhere near him, Hanlon had watched him shy away, toward the foul line. Steve Brodie, the center fielder, would catch it instead.

"Oh, the outfield's all right, but it's that guy Brodie out there," Willie replied. "He's got it in for me."

"What's Brodie got it in for you for?" Hanlon asked.

"I don't know, but he keeps on yelling, 'I'll get you, you dirty dog! I'll get you, you dirty dog!'"

The other players on the bench roared with laughter. That was what Brodie screamed at every ball that came his way.

Even as the B&O had chugged its way south from Baltimore, the Orioles had started to become a team. Dan Brouthers found himself surrounded by the young colts, who listened with open mouths as he reminisced about the old days in the game. Joe Kelley's baritone anchored an impromptu glee club. Hughey Jennings and Bill Clarke, the tenors, trilled solos.

None of the other teams had gone south for spring practice in 'ninety-four. The White Stockings had pioneered the practice in the 'seventies, but no one could afford it anymore. The Orioles had tried it in 'ninety-three and finished in eighth place. Harry von der Horst, short of money as usual, had been reluctant to send them again, but Hanlon insisted.

It was a good thing he did. "The Macon camp was one of the most interesting training camps ever held in baseball," a scribe-turned-historian judged decades later. "History was made there."

A blizzard that devastated the local peach and strawberry crops greeted the Orioles in Macon. Hanlon paid no mind. The Orioles started practicing anyway.

Ned Hanlon was a man who believed in routines. When he was at home he insisted on soup before every meal. In Macon he had the players waken at seven o'clock every morning and had them on the field by nine-thirty, for three hours of running and drills. They would run back to the hotel for a midday dinner and a rest in bed, and return to the ballgrounds for an afternoon game. Then came a run of a mile or two at a nearby horse track, followed -- at last -- by a bath and a rubdown.

"This is a devil of an occupation for a man worth $30,000," Dan Brouthers huffed to Robbie as they sweated their way around the track -- "and some of it bringing in ten percent."

Hanlon had the ballplayers work the hardest on whatever they were worst at. "Work, work, work, Work, all the time" -- that was how Hughey Jennings described Hanlon's method. None of the Orioles had the instinct for running the bases of a John Montgomery Ward, so Hanlon gave all of them daily instruction. They perfected the meticulously timed deception of the hit-and-run. He drilled them on placing bunts for hits, not for sacrifices. They practiced fouling off pitch after pitch. The infielders refined a cutoff play to prevent a double steal. The pitchers practiced picking off runners and covering first base on ground balls. The batsmen worked on a tactic that would become known as the Baltimore chop. George Van Haltren had first tried it -- swinging down on the ball, at an angle, to bounce it so high off a sunbaked infield that the batter could scamper to first base by the time it came down. Now that Van Haltren was gone, it was Willie Keeler who showed a particular knack for it.

The Baltimore chop was an absurdity, but there was no rule against it -- and it worked. Better yet, it was unexpected. That was the foundation of Hanlon's system -- whatever was least expected was what should be done. He kept pushing his ballplayers to think. Every evening and any day it rained, Hanlon gathered his ballplayers in his hotel room at the handsome mansard-roofed Brown House and quizzed them on strategy and rules. He handed each of them a copy of the Spalding Guide, to learn the ins and outs of the rules. He devised a complicated system of hand signals -- for batters, fielders, and runners -- that one of the newspapers said "would put the Princeton football eleven to shame." Control over the ball -- that was the highest good.

Hanlon noticed everything. He also knew how to command a ballplayer's attention. He refused to say for certain where -- or if -- anyone would play. He did not hesitate to call his ballplayers down for loose work. (He had fined several of them for sloppy play during 'ninety-three.) He seemed like a hard man, who held others to account. Yet he was every bit as hard on himself.

"He is eminently a just man, and a newcomer feels that he will get a good chance to show his ability if he has any," Willie Keeler found. "He does not rebuke a man in the hearing of spectators, and thereby take the heart out of a man when he makes a misplay, but points out the mistake next morning in the practice hour and makes a suggestion or two."

Hanlon had every reason to be delighted with the Brooklyn trade. "All wool and a yard wide," he chuckled a dozen times a day, watching the newcomers.

Dan Brouthers showed that he knew baseball from head to toe, and with sweet authority he swung his thick-barreled "wagon-tongue" bat. But it was Willie Keeler who was the wonder of Macon. Right field, when properly played, is the hardest of the outfield positions -- or so John Montgomery Ward believed -- for the balls hit by a right-handed batsman curve away in a trajectory that is hard to divine. Willie had started playing right field without using a glove, but after he dropped a fly ball and a Baltimore newspaperman got on him, he changed his ways. He was so quick on his feet that nothing got away from him. His arm was not as strong as Treadway's, but he got to balls that Treadway would have let by him for hits. When he took in a long hard-hit fly ball, Hanton's face lit up with a gorgeous smile. "I will make those Brooklyn people think they have lost a $10,000 beauty," he boasted to a scribe standing nearby.

At the bat, Willie was every bit as pleasing. He had a good eye and could connect with any kind of pitch. He pushed or chopped his bat at the ball. His hits were sharp and clean. The hardest pitch did not back him off the plate.

Amazingly, that was the case with Hughey Jennings as well. He had batted .182 the previous season, because he could not stop himself from stepping away from inside pitches. In Macon he stepped straight into each pitch and blasted it to the outfield. He had John McGraw to thank. The two of them had spent the winter Coaching baseball and taking classes at St. Bonaventure's College in upstate New York. In a corner of the dimly lit cellar of Alumnus Hall, McGraw had jury-rigged a batting cage out of scrap lumber and chicken wire. Hour after hour, week after week, he backed Hughey against the side of the cage and hurled high, tight pitches at him so that he could not pull away. It took weeks until Hughey had no need to.

"At first it was an awkward manner of swinging for me, and I thought I'd never conquer it," Hughey said. "But McGraw was a true friend and stuck with me. After many hours of practice I was forced to get the knack of hitting correctly."

The two small-town Irishmen were becoming the closest of friends. Their temperaments were vividly distinct. Hughey always seemed cheerful, while Mac never lost his edge of anger. Yet they shared an intensity, a seriousness of purpose, a luminous intelligence, which set the tone for the team.

Something about the Orioles was starting to be more than the sum of the pieces. Except for Sunday mornings, when Hanlon led the ballplayers to church, they thought only about baseball. Joe Kelley even dreamed about it. "Why, he never touched me!" he shouted one night in his sleep. He was sliding into second base and Silk O'Loughlin, the flaxen-haired umpire, had been calling him out.

Sadie McMahon pitched the first game of the spring, against Macon's minor league team. By now, Hanlon had settled on a lineup. McGraw was to lead off, meaning his job was to get on base, and Willie would bat second, to move Mac along.

Right away they showed themselves suited. McGraw struck four singles and drew a base on balls. Willie hit two singles, a triple, and a home run that stayed inside the ballgrounds. Fourteen Orioles crossed the plate in the seven-inning game.

It was a casual game but a revealing one. Hanlon, acting as the umpire, called McGraw out at second base when he was obviously safe. McGraw, his face as smooth as an altar boy's, charged in a fury at Hanlon. Only when Hanlon smiled did McGraw see the joke and slink away.

"Baseball, like everything else, is constantly moving forward," a scribe wired back to Baltimore. "It is eminently a case of the survival of the fittest. It is one of the most gratifying signs of the times that the men are beginning to realize this. No more loafing, drinking and carousing. Only sober, hard-working men have any chance in fin de siecle baseball."

Willie Keeler was batting .523 when the Orioles got home.

Copyright © 1999 by Burt Solomon

From Chapter Five: The Big Four

Shortly before midnight someone shouted, "Fire!" The cry awakened Murph, the groundskeeper, in his cottage on the Union Park grounds. He opened his eyes and saw a dazzling sheet of flame.

The wind was so still on the bitter cold night that the flames shot straight up. They came from the corner of the double-deck grandstand, out the first base line. People popped out of their beds on Huntingdon avenue and on Barclay street and even along Calvert street, a block away. The fire's glow could be seen all over the city.

Murph tried frantically to halt the march of the flames. He shouted for help. A policeman ran to a corner and called in an alarm.

By the time the fire engines galloped through the acrid smell of the smoke, there was little to be saved. In less than twenty minutes the grandstand had become a smoking ruin that creaked and crackled and fell to the ground. The firemen sprayed the third base end of the stands, to protect the row houses across Barclay street. Only the bleachers and the ticket office were spared.

Murph, his face dirtied by the flames, growled in the dark to a newspaperman, "The stands were burned as the result of a conspiracy." The day before he had turned out some tramps seeking shelter under the grandstand. Later he found a smoldering fire of newspapers and kindling and straw. After extinguishing them he had gone to tell Hanlon, who lived in a narrow brick row house on Calvert street, Close enough to the ballpark for his young children to lie in bed on a humid night and listen to the crowd. Hanlon had not been at home.

He and Wilbert Robinson had gone to the theater. On their way home they saw the fire. They looked on in despair. "We were about to put more insurance on," Hanlon moaned. It was not the first time he had seen a ballpark reduced to ashes. The stands in Boston had burned to the ground while the Orioles were playing there the previous spring. Then the stands in Chicago and Philadelphia burned down on consecutive summer days.

The loss at Union Park was put at $12,000, of which $7,500 was insured. Hanlon and Harry von der Horst made it known that they were willing to rebuild someplace else in Baltimore, if a streetcar company happened to see an attractive investment.

The Orioles had finished the sort of season most owners only dream of. The new 'ninety-five season was getting off to an ominous start.

It was human nature to want a piece of such conspicuous success. The first hint showed up in Willie Keeler's letter to the Morning Herald. It came after he described how he was keeping in condition over the winter, first by hunting and skating out on Long Island for a few weeks and then, back in Brooklyn, working with light dumbbells and going for long walks. "So you see it won't take very much training to get me in condition to 'Get at 'em,'" he wrote. "I never felt better in my life."

And, oh yes, he had heard from Joe Kelley, "stating he was doing a big business, and that he did not know whether he would play baseball this coming season or not."

Then Joe Kelley wrote. He was in business with his brother in Cambridge, moving goods by horse-drawn dray. "We have had a prosperous winter when everyone else was yelling for work, and I am, to use a baseball phrase, on Easy Street at present." As to his plans for next season, he professed not to know.

The purpose behind the artful ambivalence soon became clear. By the middle of February, Ned Hanlon's mail started filling up with contracts, signatures affixed. Bill Clarke and Henny Reitz signed, then three of the twirlers. So did Robbie, who was practically part of the management. Dan Brouthers, almost thirty-seven, fell in line after Hanlon showed him a photograph of George Carey, the strapping young first baseman the Orioles had discovered in Ohio.

But four contracts had not arrived, from the players the newspapers were starting to call the Big Four. Twice before, baseball had known a Big Four. The first one included Al Spalding, on the White Stockings in 'seventy-six. Late in the 'eighties came the quartet of Detroit Wolverines, featuring Dan Brouthers. Both Spalding and Brouthers were big, but in neither case had the reference been to size. It had connoted the core of a team that had arrived as a unit from another ballclub.

None of this latest Big Four had come to the Baltimore ballclub with any other. Nor did any of them stand very tall. Joe Kelley, the only one with any real heft, was just five-eleven. Hughey Jennings was five feet, eight-and-a-half inches, John McGraw was five-seven, and Willie was five-four and perhaps a smidgen more. Yet they were the core of the team. All four were Irish and scrappy and ready to laugh. They were friends, who all played the same way. On the diamond and off, they had learned to work as one. They prayed together every Sunday at St. Ann's Church, a somber stone house of God on the York road, three blocks south of Union Park. On the road, they would gather after supper and visit some of the girls they knew in most of the cities around the League. (Willie and Hughey would double-date.) All of them, and Robbie and Brodie too, belonged to the Maryland Yacht Club.

None of the Big Four had signed a contract, and Hanlon had not heard a word. He suspected it was purposeful, that they were working as a combine, with McGraw (as usual) at the center of things. McGraw, back at St. Bonaventure's with Hughey, denied it. But surely Hanlon was right. "The question that is always uppermost in a ballplayer's mind after winning a pennant arose," McGraw confessed decades later. "We wanted more money."

And why not? The Orioles had made as much as $50,000 in winning the pennant. The attendance had more than doubled -- tripled, since 'ninety-two. Had the cranks come to see Harry von der Horst? Or Ned Hanlon? The ballplayers wanted what they were worth.

How could they not think well of themselves? Joe Kelley had batted an astonishing .393. Kel could do anything -- hit with power, drop a beautiful bunt, speed along the basepaths, chase down a fly ball. Willie batted a sparkling .371, scoring 165 runs in 129 games. An amateur nine in Baltimore called themselves the Young Keelers. Jennings had had a cigar named after him -- Our Hughey.

Hanlon had offered each of them a raise of something like $500, on top of the $1,500 they had been paid in 'ninety-four, and he was not about to budge. Would they not be earning five times as much in six months as a factory worker made in a year? To the scribes Hanlon professed unconcern. He made it plain that he would take a team of amateurs to Macon before he paid a penny more to the Big Four.

The Baltimore newspapermen saw it his way. With Hanlon they always did, apparently the price of securing the inside skinny. "Players should remember that the profits of last season by no means recouped the magnates for the losses of the years before," one of the scribes opined in a news article. "Baseball is a business, and must be carried on on business principles."

The holdout continued into March. When Hanlon arrived at the Fifth Avenue Hotel for the meeting of the magnates, Willie came over from Brooklyn and Kel took a train down from Boston. They haggled with Hanlon over another $100 or $200. He reminded them he had offered raises without being asked and had no intention of paying them more.

Afterward, Joe Kelley was seen downing thirteen drinks at the grand hotel's long mahogany bar.

The struggle between Hanlon and his four stars was all the talk in the saloons and barbershops around Baltimore. Over many a lager the argument raged. Losing the Big Four would leave a sickening hole in the team. But why should they be paid so handsomely for playing a game?

Just before the team left for Macon, Hanlon issued an ultimatum. The night before the scheduled departure, a letter from Hughey arrived. He and McGraw had agreed to the manager's terms. Mac had wired Kelley already.

Willie and Kelley got to Baltimore the next afternoon and went to confer with Hanlon. He made them wait.

"Players always hold out at this time of the year and try to get all they can," Hanlon had started to learn. "There isn't one case out of one hundred where players fail to report when the time comes."

A hundred cranks sledded that night through the snow and mud to watch the Orioles off at Camden Station. As the champions poured onto the platform and boarded their Pullman, the crowd pressed toward the railing. Nary a cheer went up, not even the semblance of one.

Ned Hanlon caught a train back to Baltimore as soon as the League magnates adjourned. He understood that Harry von der Horst would do a little business in New York and then come home.

That was on Saturday. Harry failed to show up on Monday or on Tuesday or for the rest of the week. Nor did he send word. His family and his friends became alarmed. He had given his address as the St. James' Hotel but he had never registered there. They wired him at his usual haunts around New York, to no reply.

A second week found him still missing. A search party set out, made up of three men who needed him. His brother John had some urgent business regarding their father's estate. John Waltz had decisions to make about the brewery. Hanlon, preparing for a baseball season, needed Harry's signature and money.

It was no surprise that Ned Hanlon and Harry von der Horst had been on difficult terms. They were vastly different men. Harry was a man of luxury and impulse, who treated others as his private preserve. Hanlon calculated to the penny. But it was more than that. Hanlon had ample reason for wrath. The money he had invested in the ballclub in exchange for a fourth of the stock had been structured as a loan but understood to be a sale. When the value of the stock was thought to have doubled in 'ninety-four because of the success that Hanlon had wrought, Harry insisted on repaying the money and reclaiming his stock. That Hanlon stayed (and succeeded in regaining a share in the ballclub) was a measure of his ambition.

But Harry was every bit as greedy with his own family -- or whatever Lena was. A judge in Baltimore had named Harry and his two lawyers as receivers, to run the brewery for the estate, and in their wisdom they agreed to sell the brewery and its belongings -- to Harry and his brother, for $75,000. Harry might have found it a propitious time to make himself scarce.

"Colluded...fraud...their own personal benefit" -- Lena and her lawyers flung these accusations in court. Lena also waved around the deed of trust that Harry and his wife, Emma, had signed, as evidence that neither brother had been a partner in the brewery when their father died.

The battle kept getting more bitter. Harry sued Lena over jewelry and a sealskin coat that had belonged to his mother. Lena produced a lawyer with an unidentified client willing to pay $100,000 for the brewery and the land. Evidently the offer was genuine, because it was only two or three days later that Harry was found.

He would say only that he had been visiting friends in New York and Newark and that he had not known he was missing until the newspapers said so. Days after his return to Baltimore, he and his brother agreed to pay Lena $100,000 for her third of the estate.

Then he vanished again.

And then he got sued again, this time by his wife. Emma had been beautiful once and in her high-collared way she still was. When she set her mind to something she would not be deterred. She had given her husband every opportunity but he had deserted her again, she petitioned the court, without making "any provision whatever" for the financial support of his wife and two daughters. "He is of convivial habits and unfortunately given to dissipation and lavish expenditures," she charged. "Since upon the death of his late father, he came into possession of his estate, he has spent and wasted large sums of money." Without prompt action, she feared, "his large patrimony will be squandered."

The court issued a subpoena for Harry to appear. He ignored it. A second subpoena carried a deadline of the second Monday in March.

But a few days before that, tragedy struck, among the innocents. John's wife, Mary, had been stricken with pneumonia, as had John and one of their young sons. The son recovered, but Mary grew worse. She had been sick for fourteen days when she died.

John was too sick to be told. Six hours after her burial, he too succumbed, at the age of forty-one. In the course of a few days, their children -- thirteen, twelve, and nine -- had become orphans.

Suddenly Harry was back. He and his lawyers were named as the administrators of John's estate. A bank was appointed as the orphans' guardian.

They would need one.

Harry had one more problem to fix. He and his lawyers dickered with Emma and her lawyers. At last they agreed to a financial settlement. Soon Emma delivered a four-word demand to the clerk of the court: "Enter this case dismissed."

Harry's father was dead. His brother was dead. He had bought off his half-sister. Harry would soon be living in New York, apart from his wife. At last he was free to do whatever he liked.

Union Park was rebuilt, in the same location. But the 'ninety-five season started poorly enough, as if the Orioles' cockiness had turned in on them. For one thing, resentment lingered against the Big Four. Even Henny Reitz, who hardly ever said anything, had told the newspapers the holdout was a mistake. There were accusations that the foursome was hampering the team. The newspapers suggested a diagnosis: swelled heads.

Soon the Orioles sank into seventh place, then into eighth. The pitching was awful. It had been almost April before Sadie McMahon could even raise his right arm above his shoulder. How could the Orioles win without him? The other twirlers were duds. They showed little ambition without being pushed. Instead of using them in regular rotation, Hanlon waited until he watched the twirlers practice in the morning before deciding who would pitch.

All spring the Orioles mixed brilliant baseball with sudden, unaccountable lapses. Injuries hurt. Reitz broke his collarbone and Kid Gleason took his place at second base. John McGraw split his hand and was stricken with malaria. Dan Brouthers was not what he had been. On three occasions in an early game against the Trolley Dodgers, Willie Keeler stood on third base with Brouthers at the bat and three times finished the inning there.

When Big Dan's wife fell sick back in Wappingers Falls, up the Hudson from New York, the burly first baseman went home. He was barely gone when the newspapers started speculating he was not coming back. It was obvious who had planted the story. One of Hanlon's secrets was his preternatural feel for when a ballplayer was about to blossom -- or wilt.

It was not in Hanlon's nature to wait. Within days he had sold the veteran -- his longtime teammate in Detroit, his compatriot in the Brotherhood and the Players' League -- to the Louisville Colonels for $500. Only belatedly, and bitterly, did Brouthers report.

The simple wood-planked dressing room at Union Park was squeezed between the right field foul line and the fence, across the two-plank bridge that spanned the drainage ditch. Inside, it was dimly lit. Two clotheslines stretched the length of it, with uniforms and sweaters bringing them low. Along the benches in front of the lockers, sweaty men peeled off padded uniforms. Willie Keeler and Joe Kelley helped each other out of their bloomers.

The Big Four was more like two large twos. Keeler and Kelley could always be found in each other's company. They were an unlikely looking pair, so brawny and so small, like a protector and an innocent, who formed a whole. Both were city boys, and happy with their lot.

Not that Hughey Jennings and John McGraw were gloomy. They were from isolated towns and had led hard lives. They were driven -- desperate -- in a way that Willie and Kel were not. Mac and Hughey had taken rooms together on Twenty-fourth street, in a dingy brick row house the first block west of Charles street. That was where the Big Four now put their heads together at night. McGraw was not easy to live with. Everything had to be his way. That was fine with Hughey. He was so cheerful, so accommodating, evidently so loved as a child, he could get along with practically anyone. Because of their dissimilar temperaments they could share quarters.

McGraw was throwing water over himself in the vast bathtub that stood to the left of the dressing room door. He shared it with Robbie and Steve Brodie and Kid Gleason.

"Talk about your porpoises," Robbie shouted -- "watch me!" Then with a splash he disappeared.

When the fat captain resurfaced he sloshed water at Willie and Kel, who had wandered over. "Just look pleasant awhile," Robbie yelled out with a laugh. "It's 'you're next.' The bases are full."

The camaraderie had salvaged the 'ninety-five season. "A band of comrades, all fond of one another and working in a game like one man" -- that was what Hughey called the Orioles. "There have been -- and are -- stronger individual players, but such teamwork will probably never be seen again."

"Teamwork was our middle name; everything had to give way to that," John McGraw remembered. "The great thing about that team was that every one of us, individually, felt that it belonged to us."

The Big Four had improved in their play by a third since the 'ninety-four season. Or so Hanlon said at one of the team meetings. That would hardly have endeared the foursome further to their teammates, except that they knew Hanlon was speaking the truth.

Willie Keeler was hard not to root for, because in a way he was the heart of the team. He ran perceptibly faster than last year and could place the ball (or so it seemed) wherever he liked. He would take a short quick chop at the ball or occasionally swing with his forearms. If the infielders stayed back, he could bunt; if they came in, he could poke it over their heads. He practiced constantly and probed any pitcher he faced. "Every boxman has a weakness just as every batsman has," he noted, "and when you know what that weakness is you can generally get good results from it."

And he was wise enough to believe not only in science but also in luck. "I have never been able to find out what is the cause of a weak batting Streak," he told a newspaperman in the wake of a slump. "There have been times when I could not hit the ball safe to save my life. My eye was clear and I picked out good balls just the same as when I was hitting safely, but no matter how hard I hit the ball, it went straight to some fielder.

"Then, after a spell of this sort, lasting two or three days, I would again get the ball safe, although I did not change my method of hitting it."

When the League published the batting averages near the end of June, Willie led the list, at .418. "To think that so small a man as Keeler should lead all the League sluggers!" Sporting Life marveled. "Truly it is the eye and not the size." The newspapers had started to call him "Wee Willie," with the rhythm and sound of the nursery rhyme:

Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town,

Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown.

If Willie was the heart of the Orioles, John McGraw was the family jewels. He was pugnacious; once he asked the umpire if he could see the ball and rolled it under the grandstand. He hated it when opponents and needling scribes called him "Muggsy" -- the name of a tramp on the funny pages -- and so, of course, they did. His intensity could be alarming. In an important game against the Senators, with the Orioles behind 6 to 5 in the ninth inning, Mac came to the plate with runners on second and third and two men out. He faced the pitcher with a confident air, waited for the right pitch, met it firmly, and drove both men home. Only after the game, as he stepped up into the omnibus, did he start to tremble. He cried bitterly and shook as if he were suffering from the ague. His nerves had snapped.

The Orioles were hard on themselves and harder on their opponents. "Even when the ball beat him to second by twenty feet," backup catcher Bill Clarke said of McGraw, "his mind would be sorting over arguments to give the umpire -- while his feet aimed for the ball in the baseman's hand."

The Baltimore boys had been getting a name for themselves. The times were rough-and-tumble and the national game was, too. In 'ninety-four and again in 'ninety-five, the Orioles competed with Cleveland and Boston for recognition as the rowdiest nine in the League. They gloried in it. McGraw became known for holding baserunners by the belt (until one of them unloosened it and ran home). Or when he was a baserunner, he would cut in front of second base when the umpire's back was turned. One afternoon, when Tim Keefe, now an umpire, ejected Hughey from a ballgame, McGraw shouted, "Look here, old man, you sent out for a bottle yesterday."

"I was sick," Keefe yelled back.

"Drunk, you mean."

Steve Brodie once pulled off an umpire's mask and cap. McGraw and Jennings and Kelley would surround a man in blue and walk him backward all over the diamond. One afternoon, playing in Boston, Joe Kelley became incensed at an umpire who had called him out at second base. The umpire ejected him, then pulled out a pocketwatch and gave him one minute to leave the field. Kelley slapped the watch out of the umpire's hand and kicked it around.

"Now that will cost you twenty-five dollars, and the watch will cost you a hundred dollars," the umpire said.

"You're crazy if you think that three-dollar Waterbury of yours is worth anything like that," Kel shot back.

"It's not my watch -- it's yours." For it was the pocketwatch that Kelley's admirers from Cambridge had given him before the game, which Kel had put in the keep of a clubhouse attendant who had gone on an errand and left it in the umpire's care.

"I think Mr. Kelley is the handsomest man on the Baltimore team," a sweet young thing in a red bonnet cooed before a game in Boston. But after he had kicked once or twice at the umpire, she changed her mind.

In Louisville, Hanlon met with his players and warned them to stop kicking so much, in hopes of stanching the flow of expulsions and twenty-five-dollar fines. But he exerted only so much influence over the strong personalities he had painstakingly assembled. Hanlon let the players set their own curfews on the road and run their own plays on the diamond. He had sought ballplayers with opinions of their own, and they liked playing for him.

And in truth, the rowdiness worked. The Orioles got runs that way. McGraw was right about how to intimidate opponents. It also filled up the grandstands -- the bleachers, at least.

All during July and into August the Orioles bounced in and out of first place, often trading places with the Cleveland Spiders. Having Sadie McMahon back helped. Hanlon had run into him on a street corner downtown.

"What's the matter, Ed, you look downhearted," the winged right-hander said.

"I am, Mac," Hanlon replied. "I'm afraid they've got us licked."

"Don't worry. I'm ready to go to work now and I'll win you that championship."

"Mac, that's the best news I've heard."

And it was. A magician with his curveball and his change of pace, Sadie McMahon twirled three shutouts in a row. And the Orioles kept winning. They had swept fourteen straight games when they edged the Spiders from first place.

Baltimore was barely two games ahead when the Spiders came into Union Park the second week of September. The team had earned its name from the players' spindly physiques, and they were a mean match for the Orioles -- rowdy, with a dirtier edge. Patsy Tebeau, the manager and first baseman, set the tone. At the bat he held his own -- he batted .318 for the 'ninety-five season -- but he was a brawler and a bully. His cartoonishly round, almost featureless face bore an intimidating glare. More than once, he had been arrested for his antics on the field.

"Show me a team of fighters," Tebeau said, "and I'll show you a team that has a chance."

The Orioles were on edge -- they had everything to lose. Hughey lost the first game when he let a ground ball hit his knee. He had a hand in winning the second game when he and Willie slashed pitches from Cy Young past Tebeau at first.

Hanlon had said that Charley Esper would probably pitch the next afternoon, with the season on the line. But when he entered the clubhouse before the game and the men asked him who would pitch, Hanlon replied, "The best man we've got. This game is very important and we need it."

Sadie McMahon was sitting over in the corner. "Want me to pitch?" he said quietly.

"Yes," Hanlon answered, "if you feel like it."

"Well, then," the twirler said, "I'll pitch." Since his return he had pitched just about every second game.

Eighteen more nervous ballplayers had never taken the field. Seventeen, that is. Sadie McMahon, for all his fierceness, was calm as a dreamless sleep. In eight innings, before darkness fell, he gave up just a solitary hit.

In the sixth inning Patsy Tebeau blew apart. He went into a rage at an umpire's call to award an Oriole an extra base, until he was unceremoniously hustled from the diamond. The strain on the Orioles Showed up in the field -- McGraw could hardly throw across the diamond from third base -- but they were their most scientific at the bat. McGraw's base on balls and stolen base inspired Willie's single, then Hughey's, followed by Joe Kelley's immaculate sacrifice bunt. Steve Brodie's fly ball sent Willie rushing home.

The victory was clinched. So was the season.

Before the Temple Cup Series started at League Park, in the rowdiest section of Cleveland, the local newspapers ripped into Hanlon for suggesting that the western clubs had thrown games to the Spiders. The Cleveland cranks came prepared. With tin horns and cow bells they kept up a frightful din. The respectable people were not to be found. Young toughs from the city of smokestacks seated themselves all over the stands. In their pockets they carried potatoes and stones.

For the Orioles, losing the Temple Cup the previous October still rankled. It had brought them nothing but ridicule, and tarnished the glory of having captured the pennant. The cup itself, on its onyx stand, had rested all season in the oversized safe that belonged to Andrew Freedman, the Tammany Hall man who had bought a controlling interest in the Giants. The Orioles wanted it.

So did the Clevelanders, who had the means at hand. While catching a high foul fly, Robbie got pelted. Flying vegetables and minerals hit McGraw in the head and dealt Kid Gleason a lump the size of a hen's egg. The few policemen in the stands stood by.

Anything went. When Sadie McMahon faced Cy Young, every advantage counted. In the eighth inning, with the Orioles a run ahead, one of the Spiders lofted a fly ball out to Joe Kelley. Patsy Tebeau, on second base, had been egging the crowd on. Suddenly a dozen cranks leapt from their seats and rushed onto the field, straight at Kelley. He evaded them and caught the ball. His pursuers surrounded him and flung their coats in his face, to stop him from throwing to third base. As the policemen serenely looked on, Tebeau scored.

The umpire sent him back to second base. He scored anyway. Sadie McMahon weakened, and the Spiders won.

The next afternoon a beer bottle just missed Kel's head. Cranks threw seat cushions and tin horns at McGraw as he caught a foul fly. The Spiders won again. Afterward, anyone wearing orange and black was whacked with clods of filth.

The Spiders won the next game as well, on the merits. The violence might have angered the Orioles. Instead it made them listless. Or maybe Cy Young did, for he stymied them all. Willie Keeler had had a wonderful season, having batted .377. He had always hit well against the rawboned right-hander. But today he went hitless.

A subdued crowd met the Orioles at Camden Station. The city authorities urged the cranks to exercise more restraint than the Cleve-landers had, to show Baltimore as the genteel city it surely still was. The cranks were quick to reply. As the Spiders left their hotel they were pounded with eggs and rotten apples. At Union Park, potatoes and pieces of brick came flying from the stands. After the Orioles had won -- their first victory in eight Temple Cup games -- the Spiders piled into their open-sided omnibus. They had not left Huntingdon avenue when the rocks and bricks and clumps of dirt and a chunk of slag as big as a fist came raining down. The mob held the heads of the horses and tried to cut the harnesses, until the policemen and the squealing animals pushed their way through. The Spiders hid on the floor of the omnibus, their mitts and bat bags over their heads. "There is not a man in the party who has not more or less bruises and bumps, none serious, and the men are delighted that they are yet alive," wrote the scribe from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who had lain buried under a half-dozen Spiders.

The Spiders seemed not to mind. The next afternoon, with two men out in the ninth inning, they were leading, 5 to 1, when McGraw and Keeler drew bases on balls and Hughey Jennings was hit by a pitch. The crowd stiffened with anticipation. Was Cy Young, twirling his third game of the five, tiring at last?

Kel hit a sharp one, which the shortstop fumbled, and McGraw crossed the plate. Steve Brodie came to the bat, as Willie edged away from third base. A double or a triple would tie the game. Young, the impassive giant, all 210 pounds of him, reared back. Wee Willie Keeler crept forward.

Brodie swung, and dribbled the pitch back to the twirler. The Orioles had been crushed in the Temple Cup Series once again.

O.P. Caylor waited for Willie Keeler and Joe Kelley to come back up to the baroquely decorated box, even as the curtain was rising on the final scene. The sharp-tongued Sporting Life columnist had invited them to share the velvet splendor of the American Theatre on a December evening to watch A Runaway Colt on the third night of its Broadway run. The two Orioles had ventured backstage to pay their respects to Cap Anson, who was playing himself as the star of Charles Hoyt's latest farce.

It had even a less plausible plot than the popular playwright's usual successes -- something about how a bank cashier meant to win the hand of a secret heiress by bribing Anson to lose the game (and thus the pennant) to the Orioles. The fair-skinned slugger and his boys turned out to be everything good and the Orioles were otherwise. "Can Anson act?" Caylor had written after Catching the debut up in Syracuse. "Can a cat swim? Can a duck catch mice?"

As the curtain went up, all nine Orioles were swarming around the umpire, kicking about a double play that had retired Keeler and Kelley. The chief kicker's face looked somehow familiar, and there was a wondrous realism in his stage work, so ably backed up by a little fellow with a peaked face and an oversized mouth.

A rooter up in the gallery shouted over the din on the stage, "Hi Swipsey, it's Joe Kelley and Keeler themselves, blowed if 'tain't." The cranks in the audience whooped it up. With two outs in the ninth, Anson came onstage and smashed a home run that decided the game.

A Runaway Colt would run for twenty-one more performances.

But the crafty newspaperman had already gotten his money's worth -- some material for his Sunday column in Baltimore's Morning Herald. What about the prospects for a third straight pennant for the Orioles in 'ninety-six?

Both ballplayers said: A walkover.

And what about the recent deal for Dirty Jack Doyle, from the Giants, in exchange for Kid Gleason and $1,500?

Silence. Kelley crossed and uncrossed his legs, and stammered. Willie glanced over at Kel and managed at last, "Jack is quite a ballplayer."

Which he was. The baby-faced, Irish-born first baseman was one of the League's most scientific batters. "He is one of our kind of men -- active, ambitious and aggressive," Hanlon had declared. "Yes, we will have a Big Five next year."

Only the other four hated him. He still owed Willie $200 from the 'ninety-four Temple Cup Series. "Jack the welsher," the cranks had chanted whenever the Giants came to Union Park in 'ninety-five. "Settle up! Settle up!" Toward opponents he could be sullen and bad-tempered -- and toward his teammates, too, came the word from New York.

Soon even Ned Hanlon started having his doubts. Doyle had begged to be rescued from the Giants, and Hanlon had never intended to match his $3,000 salary, much less reimburse Doyle for the $250 that Andrew Freedman had plucked from his paycheck to cover umpires' fines. When Doyle vowed to a New York newspaper that he would not come to Baltimore otherwise, Hanlon felt betrayed. He offered a choice: Doyle would play for the Orioles, or for no one.

Every returning Oriole had signed a contract for 'ninety-six. That left Doyle. When he arrived at Camden Station on a clear, cold February night, Hanlon was waiting. He had hired a gorgeous barouche and escorted the strong-minded ballplayer to Ganzhorn's Hotel, which was famous for its planked steaks and shad. Robbie and Joe Kelley and John McGraw had come, each sporting a dainty bouquet. Over oysters and sherry, Dirty Jack was made to feel at home.

"We start south this year with an entirely different state of feeling than we did last year," Hanlon announced to the newspapers. "All is peace and harmony this season, and the men will pull together from the start."

When he was asked about another pennant, Hanlon delivered a gaudy smile. With President Cleveland's prospects in mind, he said, "I am very much in favor of a third term."

John McGraw fell ill after an intrasquad game in Atlanta. The soaring fever suggested that the malaria had returned. He was rushed to an infirmary and found to have typhoid fever instead. The doctors did everything they could, from sponge baths to quinine sulfate and magnesia to a diet of milk and juice and broth, and still he got worse. The fever stayed dangerously high; the doctors feared the worst.

The Orioles went north without him. Before reaching Baltimore they learned how much they needed him. The rowdiness he had helped set in motion was getting out of hand.

They learned this in the hardscrabble Virginia town of Petersburg, where the minor league club was known for winning by fair means or foul. No umpire showed up, so each team supplied one. Petersburg's arbiter was the pitcher's brother, J. Quarles, who claimed the spot behind home plate to call the balls and strikes. After two innings the Orioles demanded a new umpire and got a Petersburg player. Petersburg was winning, 1 to 0, in the seventh inning when McGraw's replacement, Jim Donnelly, at bat with a count of three balls and no strikes, took a wild pitch.

"Strike!" the umpire rasped.

The Orioles said nothing.

The next two pitches were worse -- both called strikes -- and Donnelly shrieked at the umpire. Joe Kelley and Jack Doyle and even Willie Keeler joined in. Hughey Jennings was standing at the edge of the rhubarb when Petersburg's second baseman walked up to him and, without warning, socked him in the eye. Hughey toppled over.

Doyle leapt at the aggressor and sent him sprawling.

Suddenly hundreds of ruffians charged out of the grandstand, some wielding bats and fence pickets and stones. They threw Doyle to the ground, then Joe Kelley, and kicked both ballplayers and beat them with sticks. A six-footer seized Willie Keeler by the collar and shook him like a terrier roughing up a rat.

"Drop that little boy!" a policeman ordered. Willie crashed to the ground. The more respectable Petersburg cranks and the few policemen on hand saved the Orioles from the mob.

That evening Kelley and Doyle were standing in front of their hotel when J. Quarles and a friend came by. "Look here," Quarles said menacingly, "you've been talking about me, and I want to know what you mean by it."

A crowd gathered. The Orioles had started into the lobby when the locals caught up. In cramped quarters Kelley and Doyle wildly fought back. They were losing ground when Steve Brodie fearlessly forced his way in and lunged at one of the biggest bullies, shoved him to the wall, and punched him again and again. Furniture got wrecked. Someone threw Quarles through a glass door, before the police arrived.

The Petersburg authorities issued arrest warrants on assault charges -- against the three Orioles. The ballplayers were spirited off to Old Point Comfort and put on a boat for Baltimore.

Had McGraw been around, he would have got his punches in, too. But even though the Orioles missed him, some of the players were secretly relieved not to have him around. He made them nervous -- put them on edge. Maybe they no longer needed him to egg them on. Doyle had become one of the boys, having fought shoulder to shoulder in Petersburg, and had taken McGraw's place at the top of the lineup. At the opening game in Baltimore, when he trotted out to first base, he was greeted not with shouts of "Welsher" but with cheers; he doffed his cap so many times that he bent the peak. In the left field bleachers, the denizens of Kelleyville erupted as their hero trotted to his accustomed position. More than one pair of kid gloves was damaged when Wee Willie Keeler ran out to right field.

Against the Trolley Dodgers that day, they played with snap and ginger. In his first time at bat Willie smacked a pitch through to right field and streaked to second base. Later he got trapped in a rundown for what seemed like forever, before diving back into second base -- safely. When Kel singled, Willie scored the first run of the season.

Hughey and Kel executed the first hit-and-run of 'ninety-six. Jack Doyle stole three bases. These were the Orioles.

But whenever they most needed a hit, they shut down. Robbie might have tied the game in the eighth inning with a single, but he rolled a pitch back to the twirler. Doyle stood impatiently on base in the ninth inning when Willie came to the bat. The first three pitches were balls, then a strike, and another. On the next pitch he astonished the cranks -- he struck out.

Something was wrong. The Orioles hit safely only six times and made just as many errors. "Schoolboys in the field and old women at the bat," the Morning Herald scorned, tracing the vacuum on the Orioles to McGraw: "In tight games his presence or absence makes the difference between victory and defeat for Baltimore."

The Orioles lost the next day as well, because of Umpire Tim Keefe. Conceivably he had been standing in the wrong place when he declared Kelley out at second base -- though no one had touched him -- to squelch an eighth-inning rally. But calling the game on account of darkness when forty-five minutes of daylight remained, just as Brooklyn's pitcher was becoming the veriest of cherry pies -- for that, there could be no excuse. Only that he had it in for them. Maybe the umpires had been instructed that the League had no use for a three-time champion -- though how could eleven strong-willed magnates agree on anything? More likely, it was Tim Keefe who had it in for them. Thanks to the now-absent McGraw.

Undeniably, McGraw had hurt them by antagonizing so many people, but they needed his bat and his quickness at third base. Yet it was more than that. Without him, they were not quite a team. How he had become their leader was hard to say -- maybe it was that he cared the least about what anyone thought of him. Or that he was surest of what he wanted. When he wanted something, no one could outlast him. He could force his opponents -- and his teammates, too -- to his will.

Nobody could really replace McGraw. Robbie could jolly the men along but he could not move them by the force of his will. Partly it was Robbie's easygoing temperament, or the fact that he was a family man, and therefore knew that life held more important things than the outcome of a boy's game. He was the perfect Captain for a volatile team, but not nearly a leader.

Nobody accused Jack Doyle of being easygoing. But he was disliked -- at the least, distrusted -- by too many of his teammates. Steve Brodie was a shade too eccentric. (How could you look up to a man who recited Shakespeare out in center field?) Joe Kelley was liked, even admired, not only by the ladies but by his teammates, too. He was strong and swift and jaunty -- a manly man, everything a boy could wish to be. He had self-confidence and a competitive fire. It was hard to say for sure what was missing. That he lacked Mac's quick brilliance was not, in itself, disabling. It was more that there was something not quite responsible about him, at his core. It was not so much that he liked to drink but that he gave the impression he drank less out of the pursuit of pleasure than out of need. He played in every game, but somehow he could not be relied on. He was not quite a serious man.

That left only two players, really, who might commandeer Mac's hammock. Willie Keeler could be relied on, day in and day out, but he was a man with precious little cunning. He cared too much about what others wanted instead of what he wanted them to want -- the bane of a small man content with the world. Maybe Willie was too nice to lead. He had no need to.

Hughey did, though it was not obvious. He was a different man without McGraw. He loved McGraw, and owed him more than he could say -- his success at the bat, for one, and an introduction to the world of educated men. He had always let McGraw lead, and he would follow. McGraw would not be deterred and Hughey was sufficiently sure of himself not to mind. As an exuberant boy made to work in the mines, Hughey had learned to adapt -- to reshape himself to the situation at hand. But surely he knew he was doing that, which left his integrity intact. Probably no Oriole was as popular among the cranks. Hughey was high-strung, but there was something stalwart about him -- a good-natured fierceness, a cheerful willingness to get hit by pitches -- that made men look up to him. He was without pretense. Unless his teammates were too full of themselves, they would do as he thought best.

That was how it fell to lovable Hughey to make sure that nobody loafed. He led by example, and soon he was batting over .400. He had help from Hanlon, of course, and from Jack Doyle, with their no-nonsense demeanors. Hughey started showing some hardness of his own. Once when he was on first base and Kelley was at bat, Kel missed the signal for the hit-and-run. After Hughey was thrown out at second base, he and Kel traded the most fervent left-handed compliments.

'Ninety-six unfolded much as 'ninety-five had. The Orioles sagged early (sinking as low as tenth place in the opening weeks of the season) and then found themselves. How they found themselves -- that was the customary mystery. There was often a magic in the way a team suddenly started to play like a team, or suddenly stopped. It was as if the Orioles remembered who they were. Starting off on their first western trip, against Connie Mack's League-leading Pirates, Willie scored the first run and then saved one. As the ball soared toward the fence, Willie sprinted dangerously near, and snatched it just as everything collided. He tumbled into a pile of rubbish and came up smiling, the ball in his glove, then threw to first base to put out the runner, who had already reached third. Twice Hughey got hit by a pitch, and twice he raced from first base to third on singles to shallowest left field. With the game tied in the eleventh, Willie singled, stole second base, and scored on Hughey's base hit.

"That old conquer-all spirit is returning," a Baltimore scribe applauded.

The Orioles bobbed up into first place but slumped again after Robbie mashed the pinkie of his throwing hand. When the tip turned black it was amputated at the first joint. Robbie stood it like a man, without anesthesia. Hanlon pointed out that losing the tip of a finger would not harm Robbie's throwing, because the digit had been crooked already and only got in the way. But losing Robbie for five weeks, that was harder.

Robbie had been back for six days when the Orioles, close behind the Spiders, entered the ninth inning in Philadelphia trailing, 15 to 8. Kelley went to bat in a halfhearted way and poked around for a while until he drew a base on balls. Willie followed with a single past second base. Two more singles drove both of them home. No one thought much about it, especially when the next two men flied out.

After another single, Robbie came to bat. He had hit four singles already. He cracked a pitch to left field, for a three-bagger. It acted like an electric shock to the crowd. The Orioles were suddenly just two runs behind.

There was a great laying together of heads on the Baltimore bench. The light-hitting pitcher was due at the bat. The ballplayers parted. Out onto the diamond stepped John McGraw.

The Phillies twirler felt his knees go weak. The first time McGraw had shown up on the diamond in Baltimore, as a coacher, the applause went on for two long minutes; tears sprang to more than a few eyes, for a twenty-three-year-old who had faced death and won. Mac had pinch-hit four days earlier, to no effect. That would not happen again. He fouled off every good pitch and let the bad ones pass and took his base.

The Phillies were near to trembling as Joe Kelley swaggered to the plate. The outfielders moved back toward the fence and the infielders felt for the outfield grass. The powerful batter stepped in against a pitcher whose time had passed.

Kel dumped a bunt. The sprinting third baseman took a dying chance and flung the ball to first base -- wildly. Robbie scored. McGraw got to third base, Kel to second.

Now it was Willie's turn at bat. He swung at the second pitch with all his might and blooped the ball into short center field. Three fielders converged. The shortstop got a hand on the ball but it was over his shoulder and it dropped to the ground.

For a moment the crowd was stupefied. Then the Philadelphians broke into shouts of admiration for what the visitors had done.

With McGraw back in the lineup, the Orioles won game after game after game. "His appearance put new life into the team, and his work was simply phenomenal," one of the Baltimore newspapers exulted. "There is only one McGraw, and he is a revelation."

But even with McGraw back, the Orioles had changed. They were kicking less, flaring up less, but they were still winning ballgames. There was a calmness about them that was new. The Spiders had out-rowdied them and won. Now the Orioles had found slyer ways to win.

Maybe McGraw had changed, too. There was nothing like a brush with death to show a man that some things are more precious than a game. This season (what was left of it) McGraw had something to prove, that he was himself again. But what would happen if someday he had nothing he needed to prove? Even McGraw had to want something badly to excel at it.

The Orioles swept a tripleheader on Labor Day from the inept Louisville Colonels and a doubleheader from them the next afternoon. Four days later they clinched the pennant, their third in a row, the easiest yet.

"Three cheers for Hughey Jennings Bryan," came a shout through the disagreeable rain.

"Hurrah!" others in the crowd shot back. Twenty thousand Baltimoreans had mobbed the gaping space in front of the painfully plain-looking Music Hall, on Mount Royal avenue. They had come to see William Jennings Bryan, the young Nebraska orator who had burst on the political scene to seize the Democratic party's presidential nomination.

The crowd could be forgiven for confusing him with the Orioles' star shortstop, for both were young and handsome and had a way with words. The populist candidate had also played some baseball himself, as a hard-throwing amateur in his youth. And certainly the professional ballplayers felt treated like workingmen. Yet when it came to the issue of free silver, which dominated the presidential campaign, they were of mixed minds. These were young men who had started out with nothing and now had quite a lot -- money, and the public's respect. They were men without woes. The Orioles had argued about free silver during their western trip in July, and at first the free-silver men prevailed -- the sons of Ireland, after all, were sons of labor -- but gradually the sound-money men showed them where their real interests lay. Were they the debtors whose interest lay in cheaper money? Not anymore. They already had their stake of capital, and wanted its value protected.

Many of the cranks, however, saw their interests differently, and they bristled with anticipation on this soggy September evening. An electricity raced through the crowd with the news that the candidate had arrived. The spectators strained for a glimpse as he alighted from his carriage. The thirty-six-year-old congressman was startlingly clean-shaven, with curly hair and a cheerful round face that was handsome like a spoiled son's. William McKinley, the stolid Republican candidate, sat tranquilly on his front porch in Ohio and let the crowds come to him. Bryan took to the hustings, beseeching the farmer who was in the grip of the railroads and the workingman under capital's thumb, denouncing the unfeeling trusts that had captured the nation's livelihood. He was the first candidate for the presidency ever to stump the country so intently.

The rain quickened as Bryan ascended the platform. Calcium lights and arc lamps illuminated his glistening face. He had turned up his collar and put on a hat. The onlookers kept their umbrellas closed so that everyone could see.

"Prosperity comes up from below -- it does not come down from the upper crust of society," the Boy Orator of the Platte shouted. "Our opponents tell us that we are arraying class against class. I deny it."

"So do I," a voice cried out.

"We are simply telling people that they have a right to keep other men's hands out of their pockets."

He boomed his words into the slanting rain. Most of the crowd could not hear him. They cheered anyway.

The Orioles knew they would be the laughingstock of baseball if they lost the Temple Cup yet again. "Fake Champions," the critics had called them, and the words had stung. They would deserve the epithet, or so Hanlon and Robbie and Mac and Hughey convinced them, if they foundered for a third straight October.

They had hoped to play Cincinnati, knowing how few spectators the Spiders drew in Cleveland. The riotous ways of Patsy Tebeau and his boys -- the entire team had once been arrested for attacking an umpire -- had driven the self-respecting rooters away. But the Reds had collapsed and never recovered. So it would be the Spiders, whom the Orioles hated, being so much like them.

The Orioles started the series with perfect confidence. The Spiders did, too.

Fewer than four thousand rooters showed up at Union Park for the opening game, an even smaller crowd than the average during the season. There was no mystery about why. Ned Hanlon and Harry von der Horst had tacked twenty-five cents on to the price of every ticket, doubling the admission to the bleachers.

The ballplayers were annoyed at the chilly reception and at the dearth of ticket receipts they would share. Some of them were lucky to have made a little money on the side. They had lent their endorsement to a shoe store on Baltimore street in the souvenir scorebook.

KEELER: "NO FLIES ON THE HESS SHOE.

KELLEY: "THEY ARE THE STUFF."

JENNINGS: "THEY MAKE ME SMILE."

CLARKE: "GOT MARRIED IN A PAIR OF HESS SHOES."

None of this got in their way. Hughey struck three hits, Willie and Kel and Robbie got two apiece. Cy Young, twirling for Cleveland, was a little off. The Spiders played nervously, like beaten men. Patsy Tebeau wrenched his back and the Orioles won in a walk, 7 to 1.

The attendance dipped even further the next afternoon, but again the Orioles had no need for an audience. They were playing their most scientific ball of the 'ninety-six season. Hanlon used a pitcher he had barely tried all season -- Joe Corbett, the younger brother and sparring partner of Gentleman Jim, the heavyweight champion, who had used scientific methods of boxing to lick John L. Sullivan and his brute strength. Joe, as cool and nervy as they come, pitched the Spiders to a standstill, taming them, 7 to 2. "[H]e pitched very good ball," Willie wrote in a diary he had just started to keep -- "he will be a star pitcher in a short time look out for him."

Copyright © 1999 by Burt Solomon

Media reviews

John Thornauthor of Treasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame and editor of Total BaseballWhere They Ain't is a wonderful peephole into the past, of Baltimore and Brooklyn, of baseball and urban life a century ago. Burt Solomon has given us the best book yet on a heretofore dimly understood epoch, the fierce, cut-throat, more-dismal-than-gay 1890s. For those who would understand our own strange decade of sport and business, Where They Ain't is where it's at.