Explore "Our Baseball Club and how it won the Championship" by Noah Brooks on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a great day for baseball when the far-famed Calumet club came to Catalpa to play the home nine. The visitors arrived by the evening train and were met at the station by the greater part of the Catalpa club, who escorted their friends to the hotel in which quarters had been engaged. To say that the strangers were objects of curiosity to the youths and lassies of the town would only faintly describe the enthusiasm with which they were received by the people of Catalpa. The morrow was to witness the final game of the struggle, already made sufficiently notable by the narrowness of the margin left for the two contestants, and by the notoriety given to it by the treachery of Ben Burton, now town-talk, but (thanks to the discretion of the players) not known outside of Catalpa.
So high ran the excitement that there were many sleepless youngsters in Catalpa, that night, although the seasoned veterans who were the actors in the drama slept as soundly as though the next day would not dawn, big with the fate of rival baseball clubs. Tom Selby, as his father reported, arose at frequent intervals through the night, looked out on the cloudless sky across which the harvest moon was riding, and went back to his bed with a deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction at the prospect of another fine day for the great match.