In short, I at once became an enthusiast for baseball.  For nine innings I watched it with interest unabated, until a vast purple shadow, creeping gradually eastward, had obscurely veiled the sublime legend of the 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look.  I began to acquire the proper cries and shouts and menaces, and to pass comments on the play which I was assured were not utterly foolish.  In my honest yearning to feel myself a habitue, I did what everybody else did and even attacked a morsel of chewing-gum; but all that a European can say of this singular substance is that it is, finally, eternal and unconquerable.  One slip I did quite innocently make.  I rose to stretch myself after the sixth inning instead of half-way through the seventh.  Happily a friend with marked presence of mind pulled me down to my seat again, before I had had time fully to commit this horrible sacrilege.  When the game was finished I surged on to the enormous ground, and was informed by innerring experts of a few of the thousand subtle tactical points which I had missed.  And lastly, I was flung up onto the Elevated platform, littered with pieces of newspaper, and through a landscape of slovenly apartment-houses, punctuated by glimpses of tremendous quantities of drying linen, I was shot out of New York toward a calm week-end.

Yes, a grand game, a game entirely worthy of its reputation!  If the professional matador and gladiator business is to be carried on at all, a better exemplification of it than baseball offers could hardly be found or invented.  But the beholding crowd, and the behavior of the crowd, somewhat disappointed me.  My friends said with intense pride that forty thousand persons were present.  The estimate proved to be an exaggeration; but even had it not been, what is forty thousand to the similar crowds in Europe?  In Europe forty thousand people will often assemble to watch an ordinary football match.  And for a “Final,” the record stands at something over a hundred thousand.  It should be remembered, too, in forming the comparison, that many people in the Eastern States frequent the baseball grounds because they have been deprived of their horse-racing.  Further, the New York crowd, though fairly excited, was not excited as sporting excitement is understood in, for instance, the Five Towns.  The cheering was good, but it was not the cheering of frenzied passion.  The anathemas, though hearty, lacked that religious sincerity which a truly sport-loving populace will always put into them.  The prejudice in favor of the home team, the cruel, frank unfairness toward the visiting team, were both insufficiently accentuated.  The menaces were merely infantile.  I inquired whether the referee or umpire, or whatever the arbiter is called in America, ever went in danger of life or limb, or had to be protected from a homicidal public by the law in uniform.  And I was shocked by a negative answer.  Referees in Europe have been smuggled off the ground in the center of a cocoon of policemen, have even been known to spend a fortnight in bed, after giving a decision adverse to the home team!...  More evidence that the United States is not in the full sense a sporting country!