Mark Twain: Baseball in the archives

This weekend, the New York Times Sunday Sports section ran an article on two American literary icons and their interest in baseball. The story featured Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. I read the print version, which featured a picture of Twain and an image of notes Twain kept while attending a baseball game on May 18, 1875 between the Hartford Dark Blues and Boston Red Stockings.



The NYT website featured the same two images. Below is an image Twain's notes



NYT columnist Darryl Brock, author of the article, noted that Twain's notes were part of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley. The article did not include a link to the project, but a quick Google search got me http://www.marktwainproject.org/. This project is a special online presentation of the Mark Twain papers housed at University of California Berkley - http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/.

Using the search feature on the http://www.marktwainproject.org/ homepage, I searched "baseball" and got three hits. All three were dated 1875, but none were the Twain baseball notes. One of the items was a letter Twain wrote to the Hartford Courant, text of which was included in the New York Times article.

TWO HUNDRED AND

FIVE DOLLARS REWARD

At the great base ball match on Tuesday, while I was engaged in hurrahing, a small boy walked off with an English-made brown silk UMBRELLA belonging to me, [&] forgot to bring it back. I will pay $5 for the return of that umbrella in good condition to my house on Farmington avenue. I do not want the boy (in an active state) but will pay two hundred dollars for his remains.1
[Samuel L. Clemens].

I could not find an image Twain's notes anywhere so at least for now the NYT website is the home to this interesting historical document. I suppose we should make room for newspapers as online historical archives!

some etcetera - In my search, I found this article titled Baseball and Twain by Barbara Schmit.