The Evening Telegram · Lakeland, Florida · 1914

Locals Take First Place In Florida League

Labor Day 1914: Lakeland sweeps Fort Meade in a doubleheader, the band dispenses good music while the boys cavort around the bases to the tune of twenty-eight hits, and the Telegram prints every box score line down to Umpire, Moore.

C. Green of the Evening Telegram filed the kind of lead a first-place town deserves: “The locals simply swamped Fort Meade in the double header played on the home grounds yesterday, before six hundred Labor Day fans.” Even the weather cooperated, reported in full mythological dress: “Jupiter Pluvius acted more gentlemanly than he has heretofore, and both contests were all over before the clouds began to overflow.”

The first game was a 6 to 5 argument that turned in the eighth, “the features of the game was the batting of Eubanks and Brazier, and the wrangling of the Fort Meade team, with Beck as chief actor.” The second was no argument at all: “The second game was a complete walk away for the home team,” Hall “shutting them out by a score of eight to nothing. After six and a half innings Fort Meade decided they had enough.” And the sentence every band parent should frame: “The Lakeland band dispensed good music while our boys cavorted around the bases to the tune of twenty-eight hits.”

Both box scores ran complete, summaries and all, which is how we know Umpire Moore worked a doubleheader alone, that the first game took 1:50 and the second 1:15, and that attendance held at 600 for both. Fort Meade’s day is fully documented misery: outscored 14 to 5, out-hit 28 to 10, and immortalized in agate type for wrangling. By winning the two, “aided by Tampa defeating the Saints twice, we are now in first place.” We. The sports page never pretended otherwise.