"A banquet at the Algonquin Club after the strenuous day's work is down on the program, where the old games will be won over again and Base Ball made better for the meeting of the men who were instrumental in building up a national sport."
(Boston Transcript, September 25, 1908.)
"AN HONEST OLD-TIME GAME.
"There was nothing of the burlesque order in the remarkable game of Base Ball played on the Huntington Avenue grounds yesterday by forty-three old-time professional and amateur players. It was a game in which men famous on the diamond in the seventies and eighties took part, and by instinct their old cunning, dulled a bit by long lack of practice, came back to them for the afternoon, and they played the best Base Ball of which they were capable. For seven innings men with gray hair, men with little hair at all, men grown rotund and men grown thin, assumed the old Base Ball gait, laid for infield and outfield flies, and handled the willow at the bat as only men to the diamond born can. For six innings the score ran evenly, the amateurs, or collegians, getting two runs in the first, the professionals one in the third and two in the fourth, and the amateurs tying the score in the sixth with two more runs added to the one they had pounded out in the fifth. In the seventh inning the professionals fell on Smith, Harvard, '86, and by timely work at the bat secured two runs. As the amateurs were blanked in that inning and the game was called, the final score was: Professionals 7, Amateurs 5.
"Practically every one of the celebrities of decades ago who had promised to take part showed up. To mention all the achievements and past affiliations of each would require columns of space; suffice it that A. G. Spalding, who used to pitch for Boston thirty-seven years ago and probably is the best known man in the Base Ball world, was there, and, in a clean white flannel uniform occupied the pitcher's box for several innings. Next to him was Colonel Samuel E. Winslow, who was captain of the Harvard team of '85, which took the collegiate championship by winning twenty-six games and losing one; and after him Walter Badger, Yale's old foot ball and Base Ball player of the early eighties. The two latter acted as captains of the amateur teams yesterday. Mr. Badger played throughout the game; but it was Colonel Winslow who received the cheers of the crowd of six thousand people when, the first and only time up at the bat, he dropped a beauty in short center and made possible the tying