Duque joked about it. But it's been done!

 

Yesterday, in his desperate attempt to come up with some way to avoid the Decade of Despair that lies ahead for our favorite ballteam, El Duque, our Peerless Leader, suggested that we simply buy the Baltimore Orioles and move them to New York.

He was being facetious, of course...or was he???

Hey, great leaders think outside of the box. And in fact, New York has done that to Baltimore before. No fewer than three times, in the space of about four years.

The O.G. Baltimore Orioles were one of the wildest, cheating-est, nastiest, foul-mouthed, and downright entertaining teams to ever play the game. For most of the 1890s, they fought for National League pennants with their great rivals, the Boston Beaneaters (no, I'm not making this up). 

Trouble was, at the time the NL consisted of an unwieldy 12 teams—and allowed owners to run more than 1 franchise, a really really really bad idea.

Among those teams bumbling around in the lower regions of this super-league were the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, better known as the Bridegrooms at the time (don't ask). And good as they were, the Orioles weren't doing that well at the box office.

"Foxy Ned" Hanlon, manager of the Orioles, thought he saw an opportunity. He bought up 10 percent of the Bridegrooms, and convinced Baltimore owner Harry Von der Horst to buy up another 40 percent. 

Von der Horst and Hanlon then turned around and sold 40 percent of the Orioles to Brooklyn's main owner—a Rhode Island professional gambler named Ferdinand Isabell, and another 10 percent to Abell's junior partner, a Brooklyn lad named Charles Hercules Ebbets, who had started out as a scorecard printer and ticket-taker.

These four men now had control of both Baltimore and Brooklyn, and hey lady!  

Hanlon took his biggest stars—Hughie "Yee-Haw" Jennings, Joe Kelley, and "Wee Willie" Keeler off to Brooklyn. They didn't call him "Foxy Ned" for nothin'. The Bridegrooms, now called "the Superbas" (because there was a popular troupe of vaudeville acrobats called "Hanlon's Superbas"...aw, never mind!) romped to NL pennants in 1899 and 1900. 

The ravaged Orioles simply disbanded, the owners moving the rest of their players up to Brooklyn or simply peddling them off to other teams for cash, as the NL shrunk back to 8 teams.

Now the owner of a new, aspiring circuit called the American League thought he saw an opportunity. Ban Johnson stuck a new AL franchise in Baltimore—also called the Orioles—and put the old Orioles' star third baseman and hitter, one John "Muggsy" McGraw in charge as manager and co-owner.

But Johnson, a very moralistic, very fat individual who liked to cry at the drop of a hat, had an ulterior motive. What he really wanted to do was to move an AL team into New York.

The trouble was that the irascible owner of the New York Giants, then called the New York Midgets (I kid! I kid!) was one Andrew Freedman. Freedman, who Bill James once called "a George Steinbrenner on steroids,"  had excellent Tammany connections, and was able to keep an AL team from finding any place to play.

Ban Johnson sent McGraw up to the city on secret scouting missions, to see if he could find some way around this—though he soon became suspicious that Muggsy was actually in cahoots with Freedman. Which he was.

McGraw, as he later wrote, was convinced that Johnson "planned to ditch me at the end of the 1902 season, so I acted fast...Someone would be left holding the bag, and I made up my mind it wouldn't be me."

In the end, McGraw sold his stock in the Orioles to his fellow owners for $6,500, released himself as player and manager, and signed a 4-year-contract, at $11,000 a year—then the highest salary of any manager or player in the game—with Freedman and the Giants. 

Meanwhile, Freedman had quietly bought a controlling interest in the Orioles. He released all of Baltimore's best players, and Muggsy and his wife personally escorted them to the train station, from whence they went to New York to sign new contracts with the Giants.

McGraw crowed that the American League was finished. But Johnson simply gave in, cut a deal with Tammany, and got his ballpark. While almost nobody was left on the Orioles, Johnson reassigned the franchise slot to New York, and filled it with new ballplayers drawn from around the league, or lured over from the NL.

When, a few years later, the Superbas began to slump on the field and at the gate, Foxy Ned looked to buy 

out his old friend, Von der Horst, and take the team down to Baltimore. But he was beaten to the punch by Charlie Ebbets, who scraped together enough money to gain control of the club, refused McGraw's offer to buy his best players, and set about building a new park for his Dodgers.

"The Brooklyn fans deserve the best team I can give them," he said, the sort of remark that tended to send his fellow owners into conniption fits.

Hanlon may have failed to bring major-league baseball back to Baltimore, but he had spawned a dynasty of managers, begetting McGraw, who begot Casey Stengel, who begot Billy Martin, who begot Lou Piniella among many others.

McGraw went on to become the greatest manager in major-league history, winning 10 pennants and 3 World Series with the Giants. 

Baltimore...did not get back in to the majors until 1954, when the lowly St. Louis Browns moved there.

So, looking back on this record of skulduggery and low-dealing, all at the expense of another, perfectly nice city that never did anything to New York, I say...why not do it again?