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.

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