1894 by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Baltimore Fans Go Wild

This article is from “The Baltimore Sun.”

“The shades of night were falling fast in Baltimore on Tuesday, September 25, 1894 when a telegram was flashed from Cleveland to all corners of this land. There was nothing much to that telegram, merely the statement: Baltimore 14, Cleveland 9.

And yet that little telegram had a meaning of its own. It brought sorrow and gloom to New York and Boston. It set the tongues of a million baseball fans wagging from northeast Maine to southwest Texas; from Atlantic City to San Francisco.

That telegram set loose the vocal chords of tens of thousands of residents of this jolly old town; a wonderful, heart tickling cacophony of cheers, whistles, hurrahs, and plain old rebel yells. That telegram had given Baltimore its place in the sun, had made this city the pride of the home folk and the envy of every stranger without our doors.

That meant that the Orioles, Ned Hanlon’s own Orioles, had won the National League pennant; the first baseball pennant that had ever come to this town in the history of baseball.

Up at Ford’s opera house where the marionettes had reproduced, play by play, the game in Cleveland, the rooters simply acted

1894