Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/505

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496
HISTORY OF OREGON NEWSPAPERS

the music; (3) "Mine Host" of the Barlow House for "many kindnesses" and (4) the People's Transportation Company for especial favors by Captain Baughmann of the Senator. Resolutions passed by the Clackamas club were mislaid in the newspaper office.

Here's the way they were scoring baseball games in 1867 as indicated in the report in the Salem Daily Record Thursday morning, July 18, of the game between the Willamettes and the Pacifics at Salem.

The result was as follows:

Willamette Nine

Players 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Dodge (captain) catcher 1 2 3 0 1 0 2 0 1
Wythe, pitcher 2 1 2 0 0 0 2 1 0

And so on all the way down through the lineup of both teams, the figures referring to the number of runs scored by each player. Base hits, runs batted in, and other real indices to playing ability had no part in the report.

Willamette (the University team) won 84 to 23. Each team had its own scorer.

The State Journal of Eugene refused to become excited over such diversions as horse-races. This, from the issue of August 29, 1868, is all the attention given the opening of a racing meet in Eugene:

The Races.—The races advertised several weeks ago commenced yesterday afternoon. The first race was between Bybee's mare and Muse's horse, four-year-olds. A single dash of 500 yards for a purse of $100. The race was won by the mare.

There seemed to be only about so much space to devote to this type of thing in the State Journal, for two years previously (2) they had given exactly the same wordage to the sale of a race-horse in California.

None of the papers, east or west, was devoting much space to sport news in the 60's. Here is what some of the big eastern papers were doing in 1862:

New York Herald—8-page, 6-col. paper, with 20-inch columns, had 960 inches of space for all purposes. Of this, about half, or, say, 500 inches, was devoted to non-advertising reading matter. Most issues contained no sport news whatever. Four issues, August 8, September 22, and September 26, contained a total of 16 inches of sport news, or less than a column. The average for these four issues was 4 inches each. Of the 16 inches, 9 were devoted to horse-racing, 4 to baseball, and 3 to cricket. Sport space was 3 per cent of the total for all reading-matter.

New York Tribune.—Sport news was confined to horse-racing. Sport space to total reading-matter, a fraction of 1 per cent.