History remembers John Joseph McGraw primarily as the famed and ferocious longtime manager of the New York Giants. But as unrelenting as McGraw was as a manager during the first three decades of the 20th century, he had been even more unrelenting as a player in the 1890s. It was an era of dirty baseball, and the Baltimore Orioles delighted in being the dirtiest. The most pugnacious Oriole was McGraw, who played third base "the toughest of the toughs and an abomination of the diamond," one sportswriter said.

McGraw was born in Upstate New York, the oldest of eight children of an Irish immigrant railroad worker. In 1884, when diphtheria swept through his village, he was a slight, eager 11-year-old whose proudest possession was a battered baseball he had been allowed to order fro…