...For a while it seemed as if the Orioles would be stranded in Chicago because of the rail strike, but Hanlon had an idea. He and Harry von der Horst draped banners -- Baltimore Base Ball Club -- from both sides of the Orioles' railway car, in hopes that the strikers would let them pass through. The ballplayers were labor, were they not? Evidently they were, for the strikers allowed them to escape to Cleveland.

They should have stayed in Chicago. The trip brought an awful slump. They lost two of three to Louisville -- the godforsaken Colonels! -- and got thrashed in Cincinnati. Their hitting fell off -- Mac's and Willie's and Kelley's and pretty much everyone but Brodie's. What a batsman Brodie could be. On the ninth of July he got six hits (and Willie got five) as the Orioles came from behind, 0 to 9, to beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 14 to 10. The Virginian would swing at anything, and often he hit it. Halfway through the season his batting average soared as high as .382. That was nothing like his spirit in the field. Once when he muffed a fly ball, he pounded his head and shouted at himself: "You ought to go home and pick blackberries; you ain't worth seven dollars a year; you would muff an apple dumpling if you were hungry!" He once stopped as he rounded third base to cheer his teammates on and got tagged out. Another time he leaned a ladder against the right field fence to go after a heckler in the stands, until his teammates dissuaded him. He played with an abandon that served his teammates well.

But it was not enough. Not only had the batting fallen off; the pitching was worse. Sadie McMahon pitched beautifully, sometimes invincibly, with his sharp curves and his new slow teaser, but his arm was getting tired from so much use. The other twirlers, Hanlon said, "seem to think they are doing quite well enough and are content with that." Bert Inks, the tall undisciplined left-hander, had been over-weight and smoked too much down in Macon, so that Hanlon sent him to a Turkish bath to get in condition. Tony Mullane, the ambidextrous veteran, was despised by his teammates. ("Yes, those are the bruises he got when I hit him with a potato roller," his wife testified in the divorce trial in a crowded Cincinnati courtroom on the seventh of July, "after he had cut me with a knife and smashed a water pitcher over my head.") Hanlon's three-man rotation kept changing. As soon as the Orioles got back to Baltimore, three of the pitchers went out on a drunk.

Hanlon called his players together and talked to them like a father. He told them he knew what the trouble was and had every man promise faithfully he would abstain from drinking for the rest of the season. Willie Keeler and John McGraw were teetotalers already. Now they all vowed to be. Hanlon imposed no fines, and even lifted one he had inflicted on Inks.

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