Clipping:A condemnation of beer and Sunday baseball; the brewery influence
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| Date | Wednesday, February 8, 1888 |
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| Text | [from the Baltimore correspondent's column] League and respectability and Association and beer, together with Sunday ball playing, are beginning to be synonymous terms. How can the Association be so inconsistent as to require temperance among their employees and then tempt them day after day to their destruction by openly selling beer and liquors on the grounds—and advertise it, too, in the most ostentatious manner? And it gives the worst impression, too, when the most hilarious times in this respect are confined to Sundays. True, western towns wink at it, but if more truth may be added, it is not the most respectable portion of the citizens who attend Sunday games and witness, or participate in, the carousing, and to add still more truth, many attend whose conscience fails to approve, and, in fact, cannot help but respect the league more for abstaining from the feature of violating the sensibilities of the general public. The Association should not be ashamed to take a lesson from the League book in this respect. It must come to that, however, if it is wished to divide popular favor. Beer and Sunday playing are keeping thousands of people of one class away from the games, while its absence would not lose ten of the other class. But, while no doub5t many Association people acknowledge all this, they believe it almost an impossibility to accomplish the reform while so many of the association clubs are controlled by brewers, or were first started as merely auxiliary to beer gardens or beer selling. St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and now Kansas City, nor or at one time, came under this category it is understood. Such is thought to be the case, but if injustice is done any of those clubs it is unintentional and will be corrected on receipt of information to the contrary. Now, of course, a beer man may own a club without any attempt to utilize his team as a sort of nickel-plated faucet to draw beer, but it is not apt to be the case. This beer causes lots of trouble, too. The outrageous assault by a Baltimore crowd on Umpire Brennan was caused by the beer-befuddled brain of one man who rushed into the field and was followed by hundreds of others. The beer riots of Cincinnati at base ball games, where the umpire is made the target of the heavy and deadly beer glasses, is common knowledge throughout the country. Many instances might be cited where this disgrace to the Association is retarding the growth of the game, and especially the National sport as interpreted by the Association. Don't the Association people see that the League gains in the estimation of all respectable people by contrast? This is certainly so, and unless all such pull-backs are eliminated the Association will always play second fiddle to the League. |
| Source | Sporting Life |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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