Twain at the ballgame

Mr. Clemens (Sam, not Roger) was a big score-keeping baseball fan? I had no idea!

...at a Manhattan banquet for Albert Spalding’s round-the-world touring players [he toasted]“the boys who plowed a new equator round the globe stealing bases on their bellies!” Twain then delivered a tribute to baseball as “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!”

That night, by all accounts, he was at the peak of his game. One appreciative reporter wrote that Twain played his position “without an error” and understood baseball “from A to Z.”

Had he been so inclined, Twain might have explained that his knowledge of the nation’s game derived from years of close, pleasurable scrutiny, and that it had enriched his leisure hours while influencing his imagination.

Exactly.