Mark Twain: Baseball's First OG

Mark TwainBaseball's First OG Rick Burton (bio) Is it possible Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) was baseball's first OG? Its Original Godfather? History suggests he clearly embraced the game, and according to the August 18, 1886, St. Louis Post-Dispatch,1 Twain even used his considerable (but often poorly invested) wealth to start "backing the Hartford base ball club with money." Additionally, his 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,2 featured a sizeable reference to baseball. Those two actions and numerous others likely made him one of baseball's earliest and most prominent celebrity endorsers. Clemens, the author, story-teller, raconteur, humorist, social critic and statesman, would never have felt an obligation to grow a participatory activity such as baseball. But in the span of his remarkable life, a journey that took him from adventurous boyhood to print shop apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot and celebrity, Mark Twain's creativity seemed to frequently favor a youthful appreciation of play and possibility. In that way, baseball served Twain's rough-and-tumble inner boy. Baseball was both play and organized sport, but it was also rough enough given its capacity for broken fingers, stolen bases and collisions on the base paths. When Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the organized sport of "base ball" wasn't yet culturally relevant and hardly national in a country featuring just twenty-four states and fewer than 15 million inhabitants. America's fertile sixth decade, however, saw Americans feverishly experimenting with combinations of "stick-and-ball" games, seemingly determined to change Britain's cricket or "rounders" into versions affectionately known as the New York Game, Massachusetts Game, Town Ball, Base Ball, and Goal Ball. The rules for rounders were printed in The Boy's Own Book, a collection of children's games written by William Clarke in London and the U.S. in 1829. [End Page 4] Five years later, in 1834, a Boston publisher placed rounders in "The Book of Sports by Robin Carver, but changed Rounders into 'Base or Goal Ball' because, as Carver noted, these were 'the names generally adopted in our country.' Thus English rounders was transformed into American baseball."3 Twain's early access to "sport" in any published form would have been limited. As Robert McChesney points out, "prior to the 1830s, the preponderance of newspapers and magazines were directed at a relatively small and well-to-do portion of American society."4 By the 1850s, the time of Twain's teenage years, William Trotter Porter's Spirit of the Times was "the dominant sport periodical," and while he had expanded his sports coverage from horse racing to boxing, his efforts "to establish cricket as the national game" had failed.5 This was an era (1830–50) birthing the modern newspaper industry and showing local printers they could "generate profit as much from the sale of advertising space as from circulation."6 Ron Powers confirms as much writing, "the newspaper age was dawning in America, [and it was] an age that would effloresce into mass communication and the formation of a transformative popular culture. Sam Clemens, who would come to define that culture, was there from the beginning."7 That was because Sam's older brother, Orion, and Clemens himself were quick to see the emerging journalism trade as an escape from the failures of their father, John Marshall. Sam, in particular, would start as a "printer's devil" in the late 1840s before emerging as an apprentice in June 1848 and as a full-time hand at Orion's paper, the Hannibal Journal, in January 1851. If newspapers were booming, it was a somewhat vexing time for competitive sporting activities since sport had previously been "considered vulgar and disreputable among a large portion of the American reading public. Many of those who wrote for the sporting press at this time did so under pseudonyms, to protect their real identities."8 In the case of the Spirit of the Times, Porter quickly realized that due to the sudden 1850s success of Frank Queen's New York Clipper (and their hiring of America's first full-fledged sportswriter, Henry Chadwick...

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