DIEHARD ORIOLES

OLD FREDERICK ROAD

- Ron Cassie

For the life of me, I could not run to get it,” future Hall of Famer John McGraw recalled of his first fielding chance as a minor leaguer. “It seemed like an age before I could get the ball in my hands and then, as I looked over to first, it seemed like the longest throw I ever had to make. The first baseman was the tallest in the league, but I threw the ball far over his head.” Errors ensued in seven of his next nine chances that afternoon.

Released six games after that debacle, the young McGraw could not face returning home to his Irish immigrant father, a railroad worker and Civil War veteran who’d told him to take up a regular job. Instead, the scrappy McGraw resolved to catch on with another club and make it as a professional ballplayer by any means necessary, which is exactly how he did it. The profane, pugnacious, undeterrable, break-all-the-rules third baseman—all of 5-feet-7 and 155 pounds—became the backbone of the first great team in modern baseball history, the equally uncompromising and hardscrabble 1890s Baltimore Orioles.