Edward Bennett Williams's greatest sporting ambition was to own a major league baseball team. The boy who had sold "ice colds and red hots" for the minor league Hartford Senators wanted to own the big league Washington Senators. He had bought into the football Redskins only after he failed to win a baseball franchise in Washington in 1961. In 1972, he had tried again to get a team in Washington but failed in an attempt to move the San Diego Padres. Undaunted, he kept searching for weak franchises that might want to move to the nation's capital.

Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn was also interested in bringing baseball back to Washington. In the mid-1970s, the commissioner began to eye the Baltimore Orioles, who won on the field but lost at the gate. Even though the team had had the most successful record in baseball over the previous decade, the Orioles had never drawn more than 1.2 million fans in a season. The Los Angeles Dodgers, by contrast, regularly drew over 3 million. Financially strapped, Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger was looking for a buyer. In the summer of 1978, Kuhn urged William Simon, the former treasury secretary, to enter the bidding. Simon said he wanted a partner. The baseball commissioner suggested he try Ed Williams.

A proud and cantankerous man, Hoffberger was wary of the carpetbaggers who wanted to buy his team. He rightly suspected that Simon and Williams wanted to move the Orioles out of Baltimore and down the road to Washington. A civic booster for his home city, Hoffberger began fishing for local buyers. After months of on-again, off-again negotiations, Simon lost patience. In February 1979, he denounced Hoffberger to the Baltimore Sun. "I've never seen such duplicity in my life," he said. "It's like dealing with the Scarlet Pimpernel." The deal was off.

Williams, who often observed that "nothing is often a good thing to do and always a brilliant thing to say," quietly watched through the spring and early summer of 1979 while a group of local businessmen tried and failed to come up with the $12 million. Then, without fanfare, he approached Hoffberger with his own offer -- $11.8 million. He carefully stroked the Orioles owner, telling him that he was essential to the franchise, that he was the soul of Baltimore while Williams was a mere outsider. He offered to give Hoffberger the title of president of the team if he sold ownership to Williams. In July 1979, Hoffberger agreed. Williams became a major league owner. Hoffberger became a figurehead whom Williams eventually eased out.

Williams was rich, but not as rich as most baseball owners. He was able to put up $500,000 in cash, but the rest of the $11.8 million was borrowed, mostly by leveraging his real estate holdings.

"Take me out to the ball game," sang the waiters in Joe and Mo's, a Washington restaurant, when Williams arrived there for dinner the night the deal was announced. The waiters, like nearly everyone else in the capital, assumed that the Baltimore Orioles would soon become the Washington Orioles. Resentful of their powerful neighbors forty-five miles away on I-95, insecure about losing their status as a "major league city," Baltimoreans were downcast about the sale. "Baltimore to Williams: The Orioles Belong to Us" headlined the Sunday News American. A Baltimore columnist caustically described the new owner as "a smooth professional from the high-powered D.C. martini set." Williams was apprehensive as he went to his first press $l conference in Baltimore on August 2. As usual, he had carefully rehearsed his answers. He would stay in Baltimore, he announced -- so long as the team was well supported by the fans.

The newspapers did not believe him. They continued to report that a move to Washington was imminent. When the Washington Post quoted "sources close to Williams" as saying the new owner would move the Orioles to Washington within three years, Williams blasted the story as "the nadir of irresponsible journalism . . . totally and absolutely without foundation." Williams's denials damped down the press speculation. And to save the team, the fans responded by turning out in record numbers. When a sell-out was announced at a late-season series against the Red Sox, the crowd roared and turned to look up at Williams's box in the second deck behind home plate. The new owner waved and gave a thumbs-up signal.

Meanwhile, he had told Larry Lucchino [Williams's young law partner] to cruise up and down I-95 in a helicopter, looking for new stadium sites close to Washington. "Dad did intend to move at first," said son Tony. "But he came to love Baltimore." The love was highly conditional. Williams could not afford to own a financial loser. The year Williams bought the team, the Orioles drew 1.6 million, a record. After losing over $200,000 in 1978, the Orioles made $1.5 million in 1979. Williams was able to pay generous new salaries for his stars, pitcher Jim Palmer and infielder Doug DeCinces. But the next summer, he put Baltimore back on notice. "This was to be a trial year for Baltimore attendance," he warned, "and the trial is just about to begin." The fans came through again, setting a new attendance record of 1.8 million.

By 1983, the team was drawing over 2 million a year. Shrewd marketing by Williams accounted for much of the surge. He set out to make the Orioles a regional franchise, signing broadcast contracts that would bring the team into homes in seven states, and dropping the word Baltimore before Orioles in promotional materials. His real target was Washington and its affluent suburbs. When Williams bought the team, 10 percent of its fans came from the Washington area. Within five years, the team drew 25 percent of its attendance from the capital. In the end, Williams did not need to move the Orioles to Washington. In effect, he moved Washington to the Orioles.

Williams found himself spending more and more time on the Orioles and less and less on the Redskins. [He spent his time in the owners box] at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. It was all his, and he felt reasonably welcomed by the fans, despite all the talk of moving to Washington. "Ed-die! Ed-die!" they chanted on opening day 1980. Williams thought the cheers were for him (they were for Eddie Murray, the Orioles' new $1 million-a-year first baseman). Baseball, after all, had always been his first love. "Football was no good," Williams declared to his old Georgetown Law School friend Bill Ragan. "This is the sport, this is the sport."

Football gave Williams only sixteen chances a season to work himself into a state over winning. The baseball season ran 162 games. Williams found himself attending almost every home game. He arranged to have a telephone number he could call that would allow him to listen to radio broadcasts of Orioles games from anywhere in the country. When the Orioles played away, Williams would drive around for two hours listening to the car radio, which got better reception than the radio in his home. His children would accompany him, cringing in the backseat as Williams, as ever an awful driver, careered around the back roads of Potomac, Maryland, his mind off in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. If the Orioles won, Williams would superstitiously instruct his children to sit in the same places the next night.

Williams hung on every pitch. On the opening day of the 1980 season, the Orioles' starting pitcher, Hall of Famer Jim Palmer, began by throwing a pair of balls. Williams began banging on the window separating his box from the seat occupied by Hank Peters, the general manager. "What the hell is the story with Palmer?" Williams demanded. Peters, a calm man gaited to baseball's long season, stared back in disbelief. Sportswriter Morrie Siegel, seated behind Williams, leaned over to his old friend and said, "Hey, Ed. They play 162 of these things." With a rueful smile Williams told his friend Jay Emmett, "I'm emotionally unsuited to own a baseball team. What kind of sport is it where you can lose sixty times a year and be a roaring success?"

Williams's anxieties about winning on the field were matched by his worries over money. In 1976, the courts had ruled that players were no longer chattel but free to bid their services to any team. In the new era of "free agentry," salaries tripled between 1975 and 1980, from an average $52,000 a year to nearly $150,000. With a smaller media market than the big-city teams, the Orioles struggled to stay in the running for top players. The average Oriole salary, $116,000, stood eighteenth out of the twenty-six teams in baseball. The bidding war was "crazy," declared Williams. "It's outrageous. I can't believe it. It's got to come back. It can't work, and in the end, it'll blow up. It's just madness."

Baseball commissioner Kuhn shared his concern. He feared that baseball would divide into two classes. The wealthy teams would corner the best players, and the teams in smaller markets would be perennially stuck in the second division. Kuhn advised the owners to come up with a new rule requiring any team that hired away a free agent to compensate the club losing the athlete with a player of roughly equal ability. The effect, of course, would be to slow the bidding race, since owners would have less incentive to steal away high-priced talent.

The players, naturally, felt the owners were conspiring to threaten their newly won freedom to earn as much as they were worth. A strike loomed. Williams once more resorted to hyperbole. "It would be like a nuclear war and cause permanent damage to both sides," he warned.

Certainly, a strike risked permanent damage to Williams's own pocketbook. When the players walked out on May 22, 1981, Williams was beside himself. He had borrowed to buy the Orioles at two points over prime -- 20 percent at that time of swollen interest rates. Without a steady stream of income, he risked failing to meet his interest payments. At home, the humor turned black. "We're going to have to sell the house, kids," he announced, and his children weren't entirely sure he was kidding. At Williams's sixty-first birthday party in May, Art Buchwald stood and announced to guests, "This is the last time we'll ever eat meat in this house."

Williams was determined to get a settlement, and quickly. But most of the owners, particularly the wealthy ones from big markets, were suspicious of him. Williams believed in revenue sharing: He wanted team owners to share broadcast and ticket receipts on a more equitable basis, as they already did in football. (The American League split the gate 80-20, compared to 60-40 in the NFL.) "I'm basically a capitalist, but I think baseball needs a quasi-socialist system to survive," Williams had said at an owners meeting in December 1980. "Revenue sharing, hell, that's communism!" retorted Buzzy Bavasi, the general manager the California Angels. Now, in the summer of 1981, the owners did not listen to Williams's pleas to compromise with the players.

Nor did Bowie Kuhn give Williams much help. The baseball commissioner preferred to stay on the sidelines and let the owners work things out themselves. Williams was furious with Kuhn. "What does he mean it's not his business?" Williams ranted to sportswriter Morrie Siegel. "What the hell do we pay him for?" On the phone every morning to sportscaster Howard Cosell, Williams complained that Kuhn was too weak to stand up to the players' union chief, Marvin Miller. "Ed thought Bowie was a little too Princeton, a little too corporate law," said Larry Lucchino. "He wasn't a street fighter." At a dinner in New York in June, Williams shocked the commissioner by announcing, "Our friendship is over."

Williams told reporters that he was "down and depressed. This is the worst year of my life," he declared. His strike insurance was about to run out. He was keeping up interest payments, but if the season was canceled, he feared he'd have to sell the team. Williams worked to cut a deal. He kept a back channel open to the players through the Orioles' representatives, Doug DeCinces and Mark Belanger. He called on President Reagan to intervene. Violating a "gag" rule imposed by the owners, he held secret early morning meetings with federal mediator Ken Moffett at the Jefferson Hotel throughout August, searching for a way out.

Finally, on the verge of canceling the season, the owners settled. Players' representative Miller gave the credit to Williams. "He wanted to settle any way possible, by binding arbitration, this way or that." The owners were less happy. One stated: "The scars that Williams left are very deep . . . and they won't heal easily." Moffett added, "A lot of people don't like to give Williams credit . . . they think he was trying to do them in, and he was, because he was trying to get this thing settled."

The strike had lasted fifty days and canceled 713 games. Even after collecting $44 million in insurance benefits, the owners lost $72 million. But Williams had survived. Moreover, his conciliatory role, his determination to save the season, won him important points with the fans and players. "His moderation reinforced his club's sense of unity, helping pave the way for the team's 1982 and 1983 success," wrote James Edward Miller in his history of the Orioles, "The Baseball Business." In 1982, the Orioles came within a game of winning the pennant, and in 1983, they swept into the World Series with the best record in baseball. The team won more by teamwork than the performance of individual stars. Williams began calling the Orioles a "band of brothers," his highest accolade.

The Orioles achieved a kind of mystique in those years. "Are the Baltimore Orioles the Best Team in Baseball, or Just the Best Run?" asked the Wall Street Journal in October 1983. The story noted that the team had made it to the World Series without "big salaries and big jealousies." "Nobody's going to beat Baltimore," wrote New York Yankees' third baseman Graig Nettles. "Baltimore is perfect. Everyone knows his role and is comfortable and happy in that role. They get along with their manager . . . and they've gone out and beaten the hell out of everybody."

Williams basically let the Orioles run themselves. He paid close attention, to be sure. In the middle of discussing a legal matter at the firm, he was known to pull out a yellow pad and start writing down Orioles lineups. But he never used the phone from the owners box down to the dugout, and he did not second-guess the general manager, Hank Peters, or their veteran field manager, Earl Weaver. He was more generous at salary time than Hoffberger, who had been notoriously cheap. (Hoffberger had let Reggie Jackson and Don Baylor slip away; Williams paid tens of millions to keep stars like Jim Palmer, Al Bumbry, and Eddie Murray.) And he rarely showed up in the clubhouse to inspect his investments. It was a formula for success. Roger Angell wrote in The New Yorker: "The Orioles are the dominant American League team of our time. . . . The heart of it, clearly, is that the Orioles always cling to and personify the idea of a team."

With two out in the bottom of the ninth in the fifth game of the 1983 World Series, the Orioles led the Philadelphia Phillies 5-0. One more out and Williams would own a world champion. Pete Rose was batting for the Phillies. The Orioles pitcher, Scott McGregor, who had given up only five hits, threw a ball. "F---!" Williams cried. Talk-show host Larry King, who was sitting nearby, shouted, "Are you crazy? You're gonna win." Williams replied, "You never know, man. Pessimism is a way of life." Rose hit a soft line drive to Cal Ripken at shortstop and Williams leaped up, hugging his box-mates and shouting. In the clubhouse, he called an old lady in Hartford who had once taken him to baseball games at Bulkeley Stadium. She was blind and dying in a nursing home. "We won! We won!" Williams shouted into the phone. He threw his arm around Orioles designated hitter Ken Singleton. "This is the happiest I've ever been," he said. Singleton was startled to see that Williams was on the verge of tears.

General Manager Peters came up to Williams, who by now was dripping champagne. "Are you happy now?" he asked. Williams sobered. "I'm worried about next year."

FROM "THE MAN TO SEE" BY EVAN THOMAS, COPYWRIGHT 1991 BY EVAN THOMAS, REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF SIMON & SCHUSSTER INC.