Mark Twain on Baseball: A Recovered Letter to the Editor

Samuel Clemens' interest in baseball has long been a footnote in Twain scholarship. We know, for example, that he attended a game on May 18, 1875, between the "Hartfords" and the "Bostons" when his umbrella was stolen.¹ He reportedly played baseball "every afternoon" later that summer while the family vacationed at Bateman's Point, near Newport, Rhode Island.² He subscribed to an "amusement association" in Hartford that planned to sponsor a new baseball club in February 1887;³ he umpired a game in Elmira in July 1887;⁴ he spoke at a banquet at Delmonico's restaurant in New York in April 1889 honoring baseball players, including Cap Anson, who had barnstormed around the world;⁵ and, of course, he converted the Knights of the Round Table into a baseball team in chapter 40 of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).⁶

Thus a brief letter to the editor of the Hartford Times about baseball published on June 12, 1877, and signed "An Innocent at Home" was almost certainly written by Clemens. "Innocents at Home" had been one of the working titles for Roughing It in 1871;⁷ it was the title of the second volume of the two-volume British edition of the travelogue issued by Routledge; it was a working title for his "Roughing It" lecture in late 1871;⁸ and "Innocence at Home" was the name Clemens tentatively bestowed in 1909 upon his new house in Redding, Connecticut,⁹ before he christened it "Stormfield." In this two-sentence letter, the author objected to gamblers fixing baseball games:

To the Editor of The Times.

I enjoy a good game of base ball. When it becomes evident that companies are formed for betting purposes and that each sells out, as the insiders desire, in order to secure bets or pools, I begin to feel that time and money are lost in attending the "games."

An Innocent at Home.¹⁰