Vintage 1998 Orioles Folding Fan ⚾ Baltimore MLB Play by Play Orange & Black NOS

Remember Orioles Folding Fans? ⚾ Vintage 1998 Baltimore MLB Play by Play Fan, Orange & Black, NOS

Size: 11" x 9 1/2" ~ Unused, still folded from the factory.

There's a particular shade of orange that belongs to exactly one baseball town, and the second a fan like this snaps open, you're back there — a warm night at Camden Yards, the warehouse lights glowing beyond right field, and a sea of orange and black waving between innings. These never made that trip, never popped open for a single game.

⚾ The Fan Itself

Fully opened, this Orioles fan spreads out to about 11 x 9 1/2 inches - closed, it's a neat 6 3/4 inches long. A bold orange pleated panel radiates from a black plastic pivoting handle held together by two silver rivets, the team's flowing "Orioles" script across the top and the bird-on-diamond logo (the club's primary logo back then) printed twice more below, all framed in a black-and-cream striped border with small cream diamonds marking the points. Near the handle, printed small, it reads Play By Play (c) MLB 1998 / MADE IN CHINA - the only date or maker's mark on the piece. Fully opened that's about 28 x 24 cm of pleated orange paper, and a rounded gray pivot cap and two silver rivets anchor the handle. These collectibles are made really well and are absolutely stunning in person - my pictures seriously don't do the color and presence justice. It feels solid for a paper fan, with a firm handle and tight folds. These came a dozen to a green counter box illustrated with a ballpark scene - a scoreboard reading 02 07 and a glove cradling a baseball - and the MLB "Genuine Major League Merchandise" seal; the box is shown in the photos so you can see how they left the factory, but it isn't part of what ships - just the fan itself.

🏭 A Texas Novelty Company Called Play By Play

Play By Play has a real story behind it. Arturo Torres came to the United States from Cuba in 1961 wanting to be a cowboy, and started out washing dishes at a Texas Pizza Hut instead. By the 1980s he was running 240 Pizza Huts and Taco Bells, and in the early 1990s he sold the lot for $125 million. Rather than retire on it, in 1986 he built a vending-machine and arcade-prize business in San Antonio into Play By Play Toys & Novelties, took the company public on NASDAQ in 1995 under the ticker PBYP, and in 1996 bought Ace Novelty Company of Bellevue, Washington, for $44 million, debt included - a deal that made Play By Play the largest stuffed-toy and novelty supplier in the country. In 1990 Torres recruited Jay Foreman to co-found Play By Play Toys & Novelties with him, and Foreman ran it as general manager until 1996; a pair of 1992 licensing deals he locked down with The Coca-Cola Co. and Harley-Davidson, for stuffed toys under those names, opened the doors to mass retail. Along the way the company built a licensing portfolio spanning children's entertainment characters, corporate trademarks and professional sports team logos - exactly the kind of operation that could hold an MLB license and press out a run of Orioles fans for the 1998 season. It's a genuinely American arc: a dishwashing job turning, within three decades, into a publicly traded licensing powerhouse. The company's American chapter didn't last forever. NASDAQ delisted the stock in May 2001, and in 2002 Play By Play moved its headquarters to Spain, where it had been running a distribution center in Valencia since 1993. Spain's Famosa bought the company a few years later, and since 2019 it's been part of the Famosa-Giochi Preziosi group - Spanish and Italian toymakers under one European roof.

🦅 From Milwaukee to St. Louis to Baltimore

The Orioles didn't start out in Baltimore at all. They were one of the American League's eight original charter teams in 1901, spent that first season as the Milwaukee Brewers, then moved the next year to become the St. Louis Browns for the next 52 seasons. It wasn't until 1953 that a Baltimore group, led by attorney Clarence Miles and Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., bought the club and brought it home. When the team took the field in 1954 under its new name, it reached back into older Baltimore history to find it - the "Orioles" name and the orange and black both predate the ballclub by centuries.

🐦 A Songbird, a Colonial Lord and a State Flag

The Orioles' colors trace back to the Baltimore oriole itself, and the bird's own name goes back further still. The 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby recorded Maryland colonists calling it "the Baltimore-bird" because its orange-and-black plumage echoed the heraldic colors of Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore and first proprietor of the Maryland colony - the same Calvert the city itself is named for. Maryland protected the bird by law in 1882 and made it the official state bird in 1947. That same Calvert heraldry became Maryland's state flag: gold-and-black Calvert quarters paired with the red-and-white Crossland arms carried down through Cecil Calvert's grandmother - the only state flag in the country built directly from British heraldry this way. The combined design first flew in 1876, and Maryland made it the official state flag in 1904. During the Civil War, Maryland's Union men wore the yellow-and-black Calvert colors as their badge, while Marylanders who sided with the Confederacy wore the red-and-white Crossland cross - so this flag carried both sides of a divided state long before it carried a baseball team.

🧱 The Warehouse Behind Right Field, and a City Called "Charm"

Camden Yards is built around a real piece of Baltimore railroad history. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad put up the long brick warehouse beyond right field between 1899 and 1905 to serve the neighboring Camden Station - 1,016 feet long, 51 feet wide, eight stories tall, able to hold a thousand rail carloads at once, and billed as the longest brick building on the East Coast. The B&O used it into the 1960s, it sat mostly empty through the 1970s, and instead of coming down it was folded into the 1992 ballpark design as the game's most recognizable outfield backdrop. Baltimore picked up its "Charm City" nickname around that same era, and the story behind the name is better than the name suggests: in 1974, with the city rattled by labor strikes, Mayor William Donald Schaefer hired local ad agencies to drum up tourism, and copywriter Bill Evans landed on the idea that Baltimore held "more history and unspoiled charm tucked away in quiet corners" than people gave it credit for - the campaign even handed visitors little charms for a bracelet at five city attractions. The ad itself was a flop, but the name stuck anyway.

🏆 The Season Printed on This Fan

1998 was a rough year on the scoreboard and an unforgettable one at the ballpark. The Orioles finished fourth in the AL East at 79-83, the first of fourteen straight losing seasons - and it was also the year Cal Ripken Jr. chose to end his consecutive-games streak. On September 20, 1998, after 2,632 games in a row, Ripken took himself out of the lineup for the Orioles' last home game of the season, against the Yankees, ending it in the same ballpark where it began back in 1982 and where he'd passed Lou Gehrig's record three years earlier. Reporters said afterward he wanted it to happen right there, in Baltimore. Even with the losing record, more than 3.68 million fans came through the gate that season - proof Camden Yards still had plenty of people waving something orange and black between innings. On the field that year Rafael Palmeiro slugged 43 home runs, with Brady Anderson, Eric Davis, Chris Hoiles and B.J. Surhoff in the lineup under manager Ray Miller. The bird on this fan belongs to that stretch too: in 1989 the club put a more realistic, "ornithologically correct" oriole on its caps, the look that carried into Camden Yards' opening years. And it was a franchise with a proud past - World Series titles in 1966, 1970 and 1983.

🖼️ Display Ideas

• ⚾ Open it fully and mount it flat against a wall as a starburst of orange, black and cream - the pleated panel reads like art from across a room.
• 🏟️ Prop it beside a Camden Yards photo, ticket stub or program from the Ripken era for a small shrine to that season.
• 🧡 Stand it open on a bookshelf or mantel next to other Orioles memorabilia for an instant pop of team color.
• 🐦 Set it near anything Maryland-flag or oriole-themed and let the Calvert-heraldry color story tell itself.
• 🏛️ Frame it shadow-box style, fully spread, as a compact piece of late-1990s baseball Americana.

🎁 Who Collects These

Orioles collectors chasing anything tied to the 1998 season and the end of the Ripken streak find a natural home for this piece. Baltimore civic-history collectors interested in the oriole-and-Calvert heraldry story, and Maryland flag enthusiasts, tend to gravitate to it for that same reason. Ballpark-novelty and stadium-giveaway collectors appreciate the folding-fan format so common at humid summer games, and licensed-toy-industry collectors researching Play By Play's rapid 1990s rise find it a tangible artifact of that company's sports-licensing years.

I was able to save these from Florida and grabbed them because I didn't want them lost. I hope you guys agree and love them too. Go O's!!! The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1998 Orioles fans anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.