1886-05-22ss Baseball Writers' Rivalry

The International League, comprised a minor league professional teams in both Ontario and New York state, began in 1886. Two of the teams included teams from both the city of Toronto and the city of Hamilton. Not only were the teams bitter rivals on the field, the reporters who covered the games between team equally competitive.

On May 22, 1886, the Spectator reprinted a withering criticism of its reporter assigned to cover baseball which follows :

 “ ‘The youth who writes baseball slang for the Hamilton Spectator is doubtless a ‘daisy’ in his own estimation, but other people  appear to be ridiculously slow in discovering the fact. Yesterday he took the Globe to task for its report of Tuesday’s game, and quotes five expressions, only one of which was wrong, and that was the slangy use of the word ‘willow’ for bat. He finds fault with the use of the word ‘innings’ (which he commences with a capital letter.). Now, to quote such authorities as the Imperial Dictionary and ‘Stormouth’ to such a youth would be like casting pearls before swine, but if he will accept an authority nearer the level of his standard of culture and intelligence, let him consult Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, page95, rule 48 which says ‘The choice of first innings shall be determined by the two captains.’ – Toronto Globe”

Quoted in  “Globular Baseball”

Hamilton Spectator     May 22, 1886.

The Spectator baseball writer was not one to take an insult without a response :

“The babe and suckling who writes baseball slang for the Spectator is willing to admit that he knows more about baseball than about dictionaries. That is the reason he holds the baseball job. The Spectator sends another man – a learned and aged person – to report dictionaries.

“The Globe makes the mistake of sending its dictionary man to the ball field. And the babe and suckling of the Spectator is not sure that the Globe’s dictionary man is any too well up in the dictionary business, for it is not generally supposed to be strictly correct to allude to Stormouth’s dictionary as ‘Stormouth.’  The gentlemen who compiled the Imperial and “Stormouth’ probably never saw a game of baseball – possibly never heard of the game – and cannot know much more about it than the Globe does.

“ Spalding’s Guide is a very good authority on baseball; but is not generally acknowledged to be an authority on orthography. One inning is an inning; two or more are innings; inning should begin with a capital I when the word begins a sentence, as it did in the case referred to by the Globe; if one inning is an innings, two innings must be meaningless. That is the way the youth of the Spectator puts it.”¹

¹  “Globular Baseball”

Hamilton Spectator     May 22, 1886.

In that same issue of the Spectator, a poem was reprinted, a poem which had appeared in another Hamilton newspaper, the Palladium of Labor, a weekly mainly concerned with labor issues but which also covered the immensely popular, at the time, game of baseball and Hamilton’s home team, the Clippers. It had been written after the Clippers had lost two games in a row (the Clippers had won the pennant the previous year) :

“Oh where, oh where are the Clippers, the Clippers of last year,

 Who, when e’er they they went to play a game no defeat did we fear;

 They were the pride of Hamilton, and well they earned that name.

“With Jerry Moore and Stapleton, Rainey and Andrus, too,

 Crogan and Charley Wilson, whose errors were so few;

 Collins and Billy Hunter, and Chamberlin by the powers –

“So put your shoulder to the wheel; let there be no more such play

 As we have seen these last two games – it’s not your usual way;

 But keep your error score low, your base hits good and high.

 And then at Dundurn next fall, we’ll see the pennant fly.”

-      R. A. Langlois, 45 York street’

The prize poet of the Palladium.^@

                ^{2 “}Poetry, By a Poet”

Hamilton Spectator     May 22, 1886.