Ned Hanlon may have been about the best-recognized figure in Baltimore at the height of the autumn Major League Baseball season more than a century ago. As the Orioles’ miracle manager, he shepherded a pathetic and undisciplined team and gave the city three consecutive pennants.
True, the Ned Hanlon story is ancient sports history.
He was the architect of the winning Orioles teams of the 1890s — and yet, he is little recognized today. Curiously, the Hanlon Park off Gwynns Falls Parkway in West Baltimore does not memorialize Ned Hanlon. It is named for his son, Joseph Hanlon, who was killed in World War I.
Hanlon, with his wife, Ellen, lived in a fine corner mansion at 1401 Mount Royal Ave. Don’t look for the home today; it was demolished for urban renewal in the 1960s.
Even his Roman Catholic parish, Corpus Christi, where he was a weekly presence, is slated to be closed. When Hanlon died in 1937, baseball legend Connie Mack was an honorary pallbearer. Three Baltimore mayors — James Preston, William Broening and Howard Jackson — were at the funeral.
As his health failed, Ned Hanlon lived in his daughter’s Roland Park home. When he was away from the game he loved, you might find Ned in a rocking chair on an Ocean City cottage porch.
I caught up with Tom Delise and Jay Seaborg, authors of an exhaustive biography — “ Foxy Ned Hanlon ” — on the man who was once honored with banquets, testimonial dinners at the old Hotel Rennert and presented with a blown-glass baseball bat full of Maryland rye. He was a nationally ranked sports figure at the time when the country lived and breathed baseball.
I was fascinated by the story of Hanlon’s Baltimore. He arrived here as a permanent resident in 1892 as a young Orioles manager. He lived in a rowhouse at 24th and Calvert streets, near the old Union Park, a baseball field that was not completely level and sloped southward 24th Street.
The Orioles moved around in that period. Union Park was perhaps their most famous home turf. Hanlon, even after decamping from his Baltimore managerial duties, managed a Brooklyn, New York team, later known as the Dodgers.
He controlled the real estate for a short-lived new league — the Federal League — at its Terrapin Park home in the Charles Village/Abell area. When the Federal League folded, that ball field became known as Oriole Park and the birds played there until the wooden grandstands caught fire and burned on July 4, 1944.
Hanlon’s influence continues in a remarkable way. He was among those who planned the creation of what became the Memorial Stadium site in Ednor Gardens. What Hanlon and others on the board envisioned and built there was a football bowl, but after the hapless International League Orioles were left homeless, without a place to play in 1944, the Memorial Stadium site filled in nicely as a new home.
“He had so much experience as a manager and player with so many different types of parks, he was an excellent choice to provide input into its construction,” said Delise.
He was also the leading force behind the creation of the Mount Pleasant Golf Course.
The authors describe the 1890s Orioles owner Henry “Harry” Von der Horst, a brewery owner perhaps best known today by his impressive tomb at Baltimore Cemetery at the eastern end of North Avenue. Von der Horst gave Hanlon a free rein and when asked by his friends what the Orioles were up to, the brewer had an answer. He had buttons made up with two words imprinted: “Ask Hanlon.”
Ned Hanlon rests today at New Cathedral Cemetery in Southwest Baltimore. A trio of the Orioles he managed are buried nearby — Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson and John McGraw, who went on to manage the New York Giants. As is one of his newspaper disciples, John F. Steadman, who campaigned to get Hanlon into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
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