Collecting Baseball Memorabilia: A Handbook Book

Football in Baltimore has long enjoyed the status of a civil religion; and in his book Football in Baltimore, Ted Patterson shows how far back the gridiron history of Maryland's largest city goes. Patterson, a longtime radio broadcaster with a substantial history of providing play-by-play and color commentary for Baltimore's football teams, is also an avid collector of football memorabilia for Baltimore clubs; and his extensive collection provides a basis for this book.

If you're expecting to see the Baltimore Colts and Ravens discussed in this book, you won't be disappointed. But Patterson, a thorough and diligent student of the game, goes back much further than the Baltimore Colts' 1947 debut as a member of the old All-American Football Conference -- as far back as the 1890's-era beginnings of college football at area universities such as Johns Hopkins and the U.S. Naval Academy. The longtime football rivalry between City College High School and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute -- folks in Baltimore just call the game "City-Poly" -- also receives its due. And while the University of Maryland plays most of its home games at the university's main campus in College Park -- much closer to Washington, D.C., than to Baltimore -- Patterson dutifully chronicles the times when the Terrapins have played at one or another of Baltimore's stadiums.

But the heart of the book, for many fans, will be Patterson's chronicling of the Baltimore Colts -- first, the underachieving AAFC team in green and silver; then, the short-lived first NFL incarnation; and then, finally, the classic team of Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Art "The Gladiator" Donovan and Alan Ameche and Gino Marchetti. That is the team that won the 1958 NFL championship, "the Greatest Game Ever Played" (and the 1959 NFL championship, too, though not as many people seem to remember that one). Patterson's comprehensive collection of all things relating to the Baltimore Colts really brings this part of the book to vivid life, particularly on the many pages of color plates.

The long sad story of the Baltimore Colts' decline in the 1970's and 1980's, and of owner Robert Irsay's midnight move of the team to Indianapolis in 1984, is here as well. Thorough as ever, Patterson chronicles oddities from the city's 12 years as an unhappily NFL-free zone. Examples of that time include the United States Football League's mid-1980's Baltimore Stars (a team that played in College Park and achieved the unusual distinction of winning a pro-football championship for Baltimore without ever setting foot in the city) and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore CFL Colts/Baltimore Stallions -- still the only U.S. team ever to win the Grey Cup as champions of Canadian football. I remember walking through the Inner Harbor one day in the mid-1980's, and looking up and seeing on the roof tiles of the old Power Plant an inscription that read, "The NFL Is Watching -- Support the Stars." Reading Patterson's book brought back those memories.

This edition of Football in Baltimore was published in 2000, and therefore the city's second NFL team, the Baltimore Ravens, is included as well. At the time that Patterson was collecting the memorabilia included in this book, the Ravens still had their old logo (a shield-shaped, winged-"B" curiosity that eventually got the team sued by a South Baltimore resident claiming copyright infringement), and the team had demonstrated dogged persistence but relatively little success. Few people at the time of the book's publication in 2000 would have made bold to suggest that the team would be Super Bowl champions by 2001. I certainly would not have done so; I saw the Ravens lose a perfectly boring 9-7 game to Washington's NFL team, at Landover in the fall of 2000, and was glad to be proven wrong about the Ravens a few months later.

If you're a fan of Baltimore football, then Football in Baltimore, with its collection of Ted Patterson's football memorabilia, deserves a place in your book collection.