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."

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