As of writing this, the 2024 World Series heads to New York with the Los Angeles Dodgers up 2-0 on the Yankees, their rivals for nearly a century now. It’s been repeated over and over prior to and during this matchup that it is the 12th time the two teams have met in a World Series, going back to 1941 when the original Subway Series kicked off. They’d already shared the city along with the erstwhile New York Giants for almost 40 years altogether at this point; 1903 was the first year to feature both the New York Americans/Highlanders and the Brooklyn Superbas/Bridegrooms. But before both franchises ever played a game that season; before both franchises got much better at branding; and long before they became longtime Fall Classic Foes, or indeed even won any World Series title regardless of opponent - the two already shared one link. They had both murdered a Baltimore Orioles franchise.

League of Their Own

In the 19th century, saying “the Major Leagues” still referred to a much looser grouping of competing organizations, rather than the American League/National League structure today that more closely resembles the conferences of its fellow North American pro-leagues than two truly distinct entities. If you’ll stifle your groans, it’s a whole different ball game in 1882, the year the Baltimore portion of the story begins. For one, the American League does not exist yet; and the National League was only started 6 years ago. A few years into National League play, the Cincinnati franchise was shut down. To try and appeal to their German immigrant population, they’d had the audacity to sell beer at a baseball game. That simply couldn’t be tolerated by the NL at this time; and so the Reds, as they had been called, were shuttered.

(For the record, this was already the second Cincinnati Reds/Red Stocking franchise to cease playing there. The previous club, known for the similarly audacious behavior of wearing clothes with any kind of color thanks to their titular socks, moved to Boston where they kept wearing the socks and are known today as… The Atlanta Braves. Baseball is very dumb.)

This lack of baseball in the Queen City didn’t last for long though - former owners of the Cincinnati club were called to a meeting of several potential investors in a brand new league in Pittsburgh. When they ended up being the only representatives from any city to show up, a scheme was worked out in which every other city’s rep was sent a letter that said something along the lines of “Hey, sorry you couldn’t make it. Just wanted to let you know, everyone else is totally on board with this new league thing. No need to confirm that with anybody, just start operations and we’ll all get the rest of this sorted out soon.” Because baseball is very dumb, this worked and the American Association was born, set to begin operations in 1882.

The six franchises that would make up the league largely eschewed most of the East Coast metropolises, focusing instead on “River Cities” that existed in the Midwest including: Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. “River City” was not a term of endearment, at least not from “city-slickers” on the outside looking in. These cities had trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Beer. Obviously, if Cincinnati was here, alcohol would be served at games (and also played on Sundays), and so the league early on developed a reputation as the foil to the more prudish National League.

Now, the American Association largely eschewed those East Coast cities, but they didn’t entirely stay away. The one city on the coast where they went head-to-head with a National League club was in Philadelphia where the newly christened Athletics made their home there in 1882. And then there was the one other city, one without a club to this point, which simply had to get in on this raucous good time that the AA promised: Baltimore.

Newly Hatched

Now here was a team that, from the jump, understood branding. The Baltimore Orioles (who, by the way, have through all iterations been the only major pro sports team whose full name is a specific animal species (no the Florida Panthers do not count, Felis concolor coryi was at one point considered a distinct subspecies of cougar but even that is questionable now)), as recorded in the above excerpt from a November 25th, 1882 article in the Baltimore Sun, already had the distinct black and orange for which they’ve always been known thanks to Maryland’s state bird. Their fashion sense was the best thing about the otherwise hapless 1880s iterations that finished in last place more times from 1882-1891 (4) than with even just a winning record in that span (3).

This stretch of futility is even more “impressive” when you consider that as soon as a team showed any real promise, the National League was more than happy to gobble them up. The American Association was eventually unable to sustain in the face of this revenue drain; and after the 1891 season, the American Association shut down after a decade of existence. Luckily for Baltimore, they were considered a large enough market to be one of the 4 teams that moved over to the now 12 team National League. In keeping with their history to date, they promptly finished in 12th place, dead last once again.

But! Rather than wilt in the face of steeper competition, the 1890s Orioles began rising to the occasion. The team, led by the kind of 18th century Hall of Famers with names like Wee Willie Keeler, finished in 1st three straight years from 1894-1896. 1894 saw the introduction of the Temple Cup, a series played between the top two National League teams due to their being no other competing leagues at this time. Baltimore lost each of the first two iterations in ‘94 and ‘95 to the New York Giants and Cleveland Spiders respectively; but then took each of the next two in ‘96 and ‘97, first earning a measure of revenge against Cleveland and finishing their 4 year stretch with a win over the Boston Beaneaters.

The Temple Cup was discontinued the following year; but with yet another top-two finished, Baltimore would have reached a fifth straight and had a chance to win a third consecutive title as we approached the turn of the century. Baltimore was on top of the baseball world, and seemingly would be for years to come.

Sinister Syndicates

So, those Cleveland Spiders from the last section? If you’ve been aware of some of the recent tankjobs in MLB, you’ve probably heard of the 1899 iteration of the team, otherwise known as The Worst Team In Baseball History. However, those ‘99 Cleveland Spiders deserve some defense for their abysmal 20-134 record. At the time, there was a practice called “syndicate ownership” in which individual owners or groups of owners would have stakes in multiple different baseball clubs. If you while reading that had the thought that it might lead to conflicts of interest: congratulations, you have more foresight than the early architects of these leagues.

The owners of the Cleveland Spiders were also owners of one of the other American Association teams that had jumped to the National League in 1892: the St. Louis Browns. These Browns had just finished 39-111, and their owners decided to do a couple things to shake them up. First off, get rid of the name Browns. Second, change the uniform and color scheme, let’s get some cardinal red trim in here. Third, take every single player from the Cleveland Spiders, move them all onto this roster, and leave the now defanged Spiders to fend for themselves. The St. Louis “Perfectos” did not succeed in terms of winning a title or pennant, but they did improve by over 50 wins. The Spiders, meanwhile, did not fend for themselves; set up for failure by an uninterested ownership group, they had that aforementioned 20-134 record and folded after the season.

However, the syndicate practice was not exclusive to this group. There was one other relevant team in the National League that had roots in the defunct American Association: the team based in Brooklyn that had been known as the Grooms or Bridegrooms to this point. Brooklyn shot up to the top American Association in 1889, representing the AA in a losing effort against the NL’s New York Giants in an earlier version of the World Series. A Subway Series rivalry couldn’t last, though; this season made Brooklyn a juicy target for the NL, and they jumped ship in the offseason even before the American died. They even went on to represent the NL in that year’s World Series where they tied 3-3-1. Baseball has always been very, very dumb.

So they held this wonky little distinction, but the other distinction they held was being the last professional team to play in the city of Brooklyn. In 1898, the formally independent Brooklyn was absorbed into the larger entity of New York City: it was now a borough, and the Brooklyn Grooms were now officially a New York baseball team. It might be happenstance that this move only came one Brooklyn was part of the Big Apple; there might also be something fundamental to Mid-Atlantic baseball that is necessary to sustain its northern neighbors in New York. Regardless, the offseason that coincided with the change in Brooklyn’s status featured another moved in the ranks of syndicate ownership groups: in the same series of deals that saw Cleveland and St. Louis come together, so too did Baltimore become a subsidiary of Brooklyn.

A Bullet Not Dodged

In the interest of full disclosure, owner Harry Von der Horst had originally been the owner of the Orioles before also gaining control of Brooklyn. But this was not done with any altruistic intent for the city of Baltimore - as he saw it, the team was set to decline soon; and rather than wait around for that to happen, he found a new shiny toy to play with in a bigger market and convinced decided to hasten their ascent ,at the expense of his former club. Upon gaining control of both he moved nine of Baltimore’s star players up the coast, including theee future Hall of Famers: Wee Willie Keeler, Hughie Jennings, and “Kingpin of the Orioles” Joe Kelley. Also on the move (and much more willingly so) was manager and new partial owner of the Brooklyn squad, future Hall of Famer Ned Hanlon.

Like the squad in St. Louis employing similar tactics, Brooklyn also found themselves with a new aspirational name this year: the Superbas. Unlike the St. Louis Perfectos, the Brooklyn Superbas were exceptionally successful in their pursuits, finishing 101-47 and capturing the pennant.

Looking through the last paragraph of this writeup from The New York Times of their ‘99 pennant celebration is just a series of daggers to Baltimore fans’ hearts. Ned Hanlon receiving “praise highly for his work in bringing the championship to Brooklyn”. Their new “Capt. Kelly [sic]” being presented with the bonus money for the players. “Billy” Keeler receiving a fancy gold watch from well-wishers. This funhouse mirror version of the former dynasty belonged to these fans now, not Baltimore.

To the Orioles’ credit, their recent stretch of success did not take such an abrupt downward turn as with their counterparts in Cleveland - they still managed to stay above .500, finishing 4th overall with a respectable 86-62 record. Unfortunately, the National League as a whole was suffering a dip in attendance due to the restrictions against games on Sunday and selling beer that the American Association had been alone in opposing; and this threat to the business forced the NL to contract from twelve teams in 1899 to eight in 1900. Given Von der Horst’s actions the previous year, it should come as no surprise that Baltimore was one of the four cities in the chopping block.

The first Baltimore Orioles franchise was officially dead. Cause of death: their own proprietors, as well as the Brooklyn club that they had favored. It would still be another 11 years before the team officially started using the shortened form of the “Trolley-Dodger” sobriquet that fans had used in reference to the traffic on nearby Flatbush Ave, but if you hadn’t already put it together: this was the story of the Dodgers. And by the time they adopted that name, a second set of birds would have already been killed, albeit with a different stone.

American Sequel

There are two more very important men to introduce at this point, who are at least initially on the same side of what will soon be a game-changing conflict. One of them, John McGraw, is the last remaining icon of the former Baltimore Orioles. Instead of getting moved with the rest of the team’s stars by Von der Horst and Hanlon, McGraw teamed up with catcher Wilbert Robinson and other partners to purchase the Orioles outright; and when that failed he still managed to stay on as the player manager the next season. But despite being The One Who Stayed, McGraw found himself without a team to manage the following year due to the contraction by the National League. Enter his new ally: Ban Johnson.

When the American Association had first cropped up, they and the National League had engaged in an informal compromise referred to as the National Agreement. Basically it boiled down to an understanding wherein those two, and only those two, would claim “major” league status going forward. This was scuttled in the ensuing years as some upstarts like the Northwestern League and Players League came at the kings and missed; and when the American Association failed, it left the National League as the only real game in town. But Ban Johnson was not discouraged by the entrenched powers, and as we entered the 20th century he was getting to work in establishing a brand new league that would break from this National Agreement and try and set up his brand new organization as a true competitor to the NL.

The American League, as it would come to be called, was intended to not just try and aggressively compete for the services of the same pool of players. Unlike its predecessor as the challenger to the NL’s throne, the American League sought out geographic conflict where the Association had tried to avoid it. Johnson’s league would feature eight teams, just like the NL; and three of those franchises would be put into direct competition with a nearby team in their city. Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago all became battlegrounds for the war being waged between these two organizations, while the other five teams would be placed in markets that had been largely left behind in the era of the NL’s monopoly. New teams would be placed in Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Washington, and Baltimore. And at the head of the fledgling Baltimore Orioles franchise, the second of its name, was the last star remaining from the previous iteration: John McGraw.

Things got off to a good start for McGraw’s reborn birds. The city, after having lacked a club for only a single year, flocked to the games to support the team when they opened the season with a win over Boston. But while that was a great display of support for the teams in their own self-contained markets, it was the head-to-head matchups that most concerned Johnson: In that same writeup from the Boston Globe, the success of the Philadelphia Athletics is compared against the relative struggles of their NL counterpart. Johnson was battling from behind, but he believed that with all the money he and his owners were spending to lure away a lot of the top talent, he could pose enough of a threat to force concessions from the senior circuit.

A Giant Middle Finger

These machinations continued in the background as the Orioles marched through their inaugural season. There was nothing too controversial happening off the field yet, but on the field McGraw did start to sound off with one particular source of frustration: a perceived bias against his team at times from the officials. For the record, Johnson had also courted some of these officials from the NL as well, including future Hall of Fame umpire (truly a cursed term) Tom Connolly. In an August game between the O’s and the Detroit Tigers, fans were so upset with the perceived unjust treatment from Connolly that the police had to escort him safely away from what was described as only a “small riot”.

Nevertheless, 1901 was largely good for Baltimore. The 68-65-2 record was good for 5th in the AL; and they drew roughly 1,000 fans per game, good for 6th among the eight AL squads. Entering 1902, they even got a shot in the arm with the return of one of the nine players plundered by Brooklyn, Joe Kelley, who came back to join his former Oriole teammates McGraw and Robinson. But now that the AL had a season under its belt and had proved to have some amount of staying power even with the (relatively) massive expenditures it had put into getting off the ground. Johnson was a real threat the the NL, and the “price of peace” that he would try to extract from his rivals was coming into focus. He wanted a team in New York City.

A league meeting towards the end of the 1901 season saw the owners come to the decision that it was still too early to make the move yet - New York after all already had two teams between the Giants and Superbas - but now the sword of Damocles hung over the head of any American League team that didn’t live up to expectations. Someone was going to eventually get moved to New York if Johnson had his way, and the fortunes of the eight AL teams in 1902 could very well prove to be the deciding factor.

Through June 28 of that year, things were going alright for Baltimore, if not astoundingly well: entering this game against Boston, they were 26-30 and 8.5 games out of first place. During this game, John McGraw was tossed in the 8th inning by the umpire for arguing. After the game a fed-up McGraw declared that if he was suspended due to this, he’d leave the AL forever and head to the NL. It’s worth mentioning that the umpire for this incident was none other than Tom Connolly from the previous year’s Detroit fiasco.

Friends of McGraw believed these statements to largely be him blowing off steam. Surely, the bedrock of the team, the last person this city could truly count on in this situation - surely this was all bluster. If anyone were to remain loyal even in the face of Johnson’s supposed meddling, surely it would be John McGraw.

Unfortunately, baseball is very dumb. That Monday, Johnson announced that McGraw would indeed receive a suspension for his dispute with Connolly; and on July 7 of that year, McGraw decided that if Johnson wanted to get into New York so badly, the least he could do was beat him to the punch. John McGraw was made a partial owner and full-time player-manager of the New York Giants, a team with which he would remain for another thirty years.

The Low Road to the Highlands

Now, that’s certainly another excellent example of a long stretch of New York success coming at Baltimore’s expense (the Giants would win three World Series championships in nine appearances during McGraw’s tenure), there still remained a Baltimore Orioles team at least for the time being. Someone had to grab the reins, and so with the city and team stunned by the betrayal, longtime compatriots Kelley and Robinson took up the mantle of manager in an attempt to stay the course. But as the summer went on and Johnson spoke further on the situation, the writing was now starting to appear clear as day on the wall.

To the Orioles fans’ credit, their ire remained aimed at Johnson through all of this, though he made it pretty easy to identify himself as the main culprit/target by trying to practically deepthroat his foot. Within days, he was in the papers trying to smear Kelley and Robinson has having been the main forces behind McGraw’s ousting; and while it’s true that Baltimore had lagged in attendance this year (they would eventually finish in last even with a 30,000 overall increase compared to 1901), Johnson now wanted to go so far as to blame McGraw’s exit as some kind of untenable financial burden that would keep the city from being able to keep pace with the otherwise complete success of the AL elsewhere.

Prior to McGraw’s departure, the team had been a middle of the pack team with a 26-31-1 record a little less than halfway through the season. Under the tandem of Kelley and Robinson, they finished their final 83 games with a 24-57-2 record, dropping them all the way down to dead last in the AL. With their attendance also down, things looked grim for this second coming of the O’s before they even really got going. The managerial tandem had been aware of the stakes: when they visited with Johnson in Chicago earlier that season, they later would recall that “To everything that [they] said about Baltimore and giving it a chance he would reply that New York is the place for the Baltimore team.”

After two years now of butting heads with their young upstart rivals, the National League ahead of the 1903 season capitulated to Johnson’s demands in order to come to a new National Agreement: the National and American Leagues would now come to an understanding that they, and they alone, with the arbiters going forward of Major League baseball. Along with the establishment of the modern World Series tradition in which the pennant winner in each league would square off in a best-of-seven (or sometimes best-of-nine, baseball is very dumb) series to determine the ultimate champion, this new National Agreement meant that Johnson would finally get his wish of AL baseball in New York.

The team, which had already been put into temporary out-of-town ownership in order to make its payments for the rest of the 1902 season, was to be sold to a new pair of owners that Johnson had found in New York: William Devery and Frank Farrell. I wonder what they’d been up to around this time?

Nothing to see here, folks, just a corrupt Tammany Hall politician who also happens to be the very first police chief for the NYPD and buddy of his identified as a member of the “gambling combine” being handed Baltimore’s former baseball team. For the second time in three years, a team from New York had killed the Orioles. The New York AL team went on to make their home in Washington Heights, and began their new lives as the New York Highlanders.

Gateways

The President Mahon referred to in the above clipping was NL President Mahon, so with him being the one to speak on Ban Johnson’s insistence that “the American League will see that [Baltimore] is given baseball”, one could assume that he had either genuine insight into Johnson’s plans or at the very least trusted him. After all, it was only 6 years ago that the city had seen their team win a second straight Temple Cup in their fourth straight appearance. From 1894-1898, they had gone 450-214-17 and never finished below second place in the twelve-team American Association. Now, just half a decade later, they had seen not one but two pro teams burn in order to feed the flames of the sport in New York City.

The American League would not give the city of Baltimore baseball for 51 more years, when the Browns were moved there in 1954. No, not the St. Louis Browns that changed their name to the Perfectos after killing the Cleveland Spider, they’re the Cardinals now. A different St. Louis Browns just happened to take the name up shortly after the redbirds name change, only to now make their move to the east coast. Baseball will always be very dumb.

During those 51 years, Brooklyn made it to the World Series seven times, though they never won during that stretch; the Giants, again thanks in part to John McGraw, made it thirteen times and won thrice; and the New York Highlanders, after changing their name in 1913, made it on twenty occasions with a staggering sixteen wins. It may have taken them a little bit to get going; but particularly following the acquisition of Baltimore native Babe Ruth, the newly christened Yankees were unstoppable - the shiniest jewel in the triple crown of New York baseball, made of metal taken from Baltimore and re-forged into something new.

It would be foolish to pathologize an entire city on the basis of five years of rotten baseball luck, even if it is one of the swiftest declines for a city in the history of the sport. Clearly, most of these events were the result of deliberate actions were taken by just handful of individuals, and to extrapolate some kind of psychological relationship between the two cities would maybe only serve to reveal inner insecurities of the person doing the extrapolation. With that being said and at the risk of revealing such insecurities, let’s still try and make one final point here.

For much of the 19th century, Baltimore was not only one of the centers of the industrial world due in part to its port and robust rail infrastructure: it also served as the second largest hub of immigration on the east coast, coming in only behind New York City. Part of the reason, though, that it never grew to quite to metropolitan heights of a New York or Los Angeles was because of the freedom of movement afforded by those features that made the city so attractive in the first place. Baseball is just a microcosm of what Baltimore has seen for much of the 20th century, as it has declined in both population and posterity at the far edge of the Rust Belt.

But even if now it’s know for a sitting President calling it rat-infested, or for a bridge collapsing, or just for The Wire, it is important to remember that great things have come from here. Great people have come from here. Great teams have come from here - hell, two of them are playing in the World Series right now. There is greatness in the city of Baltimore, even if it’s not in the national line of sight. Regardless of what any fascists might tell you, this kind of essential freedom of movement in and out and throughout of a country is an objectively good thing in modern society; and the cities that become welcoming should be lauded for serving as these gateways to opportunity. But the thing about a gateway, is that many of the best people may just pass through on their way to bigger and better things.