Oregon Azureines · Oregon, Missouri · 1889

They would have eaten St. Joe up, even as the small boy eateth plum pudding

The Sentinel's verdict on a 12 to 7 loss to St. Joe: every team has its off days, ours had one the 24th, and the pig-headed people grunting about it should stop. Six hundred people watched. The box score survives, and so does the best game account this desk has read in some time.

Three weeks after announcing the Azureines would host the St. Joe Monarchs, the Holt County Sentinel had a loss to explain, and it opened by scolding the town: the sooner “a few ‘pig-headed’ people quit grunting about the loss of that game with St. Joe the better it will be for all concerned. Every team has its ‘off’ days, and ours had one the 24th.” Then the sentence this post exists for: “Had the Oregon boys put up even their usual game they would have eaten St. Joe up, even as the small boy eateth plum pudding. But they didn’t and that’s ‘the conclusion of the whole matter,’ as Paul would say.”

About 600 people watched, and the anonymous correspondent earned every dime of them. Right fielder Foster is introduced as a man “whose uncle had offered him the bounty of 10 cents for the scalp of every fly he took care of.” One batted ball “started for the left field with a shriek, and its whiskers flying in the wind, but it met an unexpected impediment in Hinde who gathered it in out of the ether and returned it to first twenty feet ahead of Crawford who was galloping back with his eyes bulging out like buckeyes on a mud wall.” A play in the third is classified, scientifically, “in the genus ‘Lulu.’”

The Monarchs won it 12 to 7, and the box score is all there: time of game 1:55, umpire Mont Curry. The Sentinel took the loss like a town that expected to see these fellows again. “It was a tough game to lose, but there is no occasion for tears. St. Joe plays a stiff game, and her players were doubtless playing professional ball when most of our boys were running around barefooted learning to ‘cuss.’” And the final ruling, which should hang in every clubhouse: “Nine out of eleven is a record for any team.”