"Aggressiveness," McGraw said later, "is the main thing in baseball."

He showed it every day on the diamond. He dived into bases and blocked the hard hits that Billy Shindle would have let by for two-baggers. "Little Mac at third was a whole team and a dog under the wagon," the Morning Herald in Baltimore said as the Giants skulked out of town. "His skin is full of baseball, and when he starts into a game he forgets everything else and thinks only of winning. He is absolutely fearless, and will not get out of the way of anything or anybody." He pursued every advantage. In the third game against the Giants, when a wild pitch nicked his bat, he clutched the back of his head and started for first base. When the umpire refused to be fooled, even Mac cracked a smile.

His teammates both loved and feared him. He could inspire them -- or ridicule them -- to new levels of intensity. He made sure that they kept one another in line. "Woe betide the player who failed us!" McGraw said. "His life on the bench was not a pleasant one. He never forgot the roasting and never failed to deliver one if somebody else failed."

The Orioles were as lively as crickets. The champion Beaneaters, who followed the Giants into Union Park, led by two runs going into the ninth inning, when the Orioles rose up and scored fourteen. Every afternoon saw a different hero. Willie beat out grounders to first base. He and Mac worked the hit-and-run once or twice -- even three times -- a game. Robbie, the stout catcher, stole bases. Dan Brouthers unleashed his wagon-tongue bat and once even drove a pitch over the right-center field fence, so that a sign was put up boasting, HERE. (Legend later had it that the ball bounced over to Calvert street and landed in a coal car at Union Station, winding up in Philadelphia.) The next day it was Joe Kelley's home run, on top of his triple and two acrobatic catches. Hughey Jennings was learning to tighten the muscles in his torso to brace himself for getting hit by the pitch. "Oh yes it takes nerve," he confided, "but you can't play ball without nerve."

Nerve was what the Orioles had -- and smarts. They were too young and too full of themselves to know they could not invent whatever they wished. Night after night, in the viscous heat of the Baltimore summer, McGraw and Keeler and Kelley and Jennings sat up and puzzled out schemes to win ballgames. Who needed Hanlon? "Then we'd go out to the ballpark the next day and try them out, practicing them till we got them letter perfect," McGraw recollected. For hours they calibrated the chances of a runner's scoring from third base on a sacrifice bunt if he dashed for the plate at the pitcher's first motion. On the diamond they discovered that, on a bunt anywhere inside the foul lines, the runner could not be thrown out if he left instantly. And thus, as McGraw remembered it, the squeeze play was born.

» NEXT