Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball

Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball

by Burt Solomon
Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball

Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball

by Burt Solomon

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Overview

In the 1890s, the legendary Baltimore Orioles of the National League (sic) under the tutelage of manager Ned Hanlon, perfected a style of play known as "scientific baseball, " featuring such innovations as the sacrifice bunt, the hit-and-run, the squeeze play, and the infamous Baltimore chop. Its best hitter, Wee Willie Keeler, had the motto "keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't" -- which he did. He and his colorful teammates, fierce third-baseman John McGraw, avuncular catcher Wibert Robinson, and heartthrob center fielder Joe Kelly, won three straight pennants from 1894 to 1896. But the Orioles were swept up and ultimately destroyed in a business intrigue involving the political machines of three large cities and collusion with the ambitious men who ran the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. Burt Solomon narrates the rise and fall of this colorful franchise as a cautionary tale of greed and overreaching that speaks volumes as well about the enterprise of baseball a century later.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780385498821
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 03/14/2000
Pages: 372
Sales rank: 516,128
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

BURT SOLOMON has been a staff correspondent for the National Journal since 1985, where he has covered the White House, lobbying, and ideas. A native of Baltimore and a lifelong Orioles fan, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

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 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 doubl e-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 prof its 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 Han lon 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 patrimon y 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 fron t 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 -- str onger 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 pu blished 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 com peted 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 s o 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 S piders.

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.< P>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, real ly, 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 'ninet y-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 a dmiration 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

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