0. When the base-ball season was at
its height his column would bristle with the proofs of his vivid
interest in it. I have known it on one day to contain over a score
of paragraphs relating to the national game, encouraging the home
nine or lampooning the rival club with all the personal vivacity of
a sporting reporter writing for a country weekly. Interspersed among
these notes would be many an odorous comparison like this, printed
June 28th, 1888:

Benjamin Harrison is a good, honest, patriotic man, and we like him.
But he never stole second base in all his life and he could not swat
Mickey Welch's down curves over the left-field fence. Therefore we
say again, as we have said many times before, that much as we revere
Benjamin Harrison's purity and amiability, we cannot but accord the
tribute of our sincerest admiration, to that paragon of American
manhood, Michael J. Kelly.

So when Kelly essayed to change the scene of his labors from the
diamond to the melodramatic stage in 1893 it is not surprising to find
that Field, in a semi-humorous and semi-serious vein, thus applauded
and approved his choice:

Surprise is expressed in certain quarters because Mike Kelly, the
base-ball virtuoso, has made a hit upon the dramatic stage. The
error into which many people have fallen is in supposing that Kelly
was simply a clever base-ball machine. He is very much more than
this: he is an unusually bright and intelligent man. As a class,
base-ball professionals are either dull brutes or ribald brutes;
ignorance as dense as Egyptian darkness has seemed to constitute one
of the essentials to successful base-ball playing, and the average
professional occupies an intellectual plane hardly above that of the
average stall-fed ox or the fat pig at a country fair. Mike Kelly
stands pre-eminent in his profession; no other base-ball player
approaches him. He is in every way qualified for a better career
than that which is bounded on one side by the bleaching boards, and
on the other by the bar-room. Of course he is a good actor. He is
too smart to attempt anything at which he does not excel.

But I have been diverted from telling of the sport in which Field was
an active participant by the recollection of his critical and literary
expertness in the great game in which he never took an active part.
Once when Melville Stone was asked what was his dearest wish at that
instant, he replied, "to bea