The <i>New York Clipper</i> and Sporting Weeklies of Its Time

Abstract

New York Clipper, founded in 1853, was not America's first sporting paper. Although it carried a report of a baseball game in its first year of operation, it was not the first paper to do so. It was never all about baseball, or even primarily so. Yet more than any other publication, the Clipper may be said to have transformed a boys' game into the national pastime.Three essential ingredients will facilitate the growth from localized game to national sport. First, gambling. Adults must care about the outcome, and their willingness to place a wager is a measure of their interest. As a game matures, investors and civic boosters may pool their interests to absorb greater risk, placing their bets on the protracted success of an athlete, a club, or a sporting venture. Second, publicity. Regular press coverage is a necessary development to waftthe passion exhibited at a single contest, however it may have been fueled, to those only reading about it afterward. Third, statistics. Whether merely game scores or primitive tabulations, these numerical attachments to prose reports accord a mantle of importance to the matches-an importance like that of trade or transport or government.Before baseball came to dominate the sporting scene in the last quarter of the 19th century, these three elements had previously advanced, with differing levels of success, the interests of other sports: the turf, the ring, sculling, cricket, and blood sports (ratting, baiting, cockfighting, dog fighting). Whether the crowd drawn by the activity was low or genteel, the ingredients and the progression were the same. To place in context how the Clipper advanced the status of baseball, let's examine briefly the sporting papers that paved its way. These were concerned with, variously, hunting, angling, pugilism, pedestrianism (race or distance walking), and most of all horseracing.Despite the nationwide surge of interest during the Jacksonian era in newspapers and magazines touching upon all topics-from politics to religion, from literature to commerce-sporting coverage lagged. Devotees of turf, ring, field, and stream had to await the arrival of the weekly Bell's Life in London (founded in 1822). Baltimorean John Stuart Skinner established, in 1819, American Farmer, the first agricultural journal in this country; for its pages in 1825 he penned the nation's first turf column, The Sporting Olio. Four years later he replaced American Farmer with the monthly American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, which thus became America's first enduring sporting paper.1According to John Hankins Wallace in Horse of America in His Derivation, History and Development, Skinner sought for his new publication an encyclopedic status:As its name indicated its field, it at once became the authority on sporting events and the receptacle of a great amount of valuable correspondence on the horses of the day, as well as the earlier race horses. Mr. Skinner was industrious in collecting material for his magazine, but unfortunately he published whatever was sent to him relating to the horse, and just as it was sent. If a communication was well written, no difference how many errors of fact it might contain, it never seemed to occur to Mr. Skinner to use his blue pencil. Pedigrees were sent in, amounting to many thousands, during his ownership, with fictitious and untruthful remote extensions, and published without any possibility of tracing the different crosses to a known or responsible source or name.... magazine received less and less attention from its proprietor each succeeding year and finally it was transferred to the Spirit of the Times, of New York, and died after an existence of some fifteen years [Sept. 1829-Dec. 1844].2Skinner's indifference to fact would continue to plague sporting papers, and the sporting sections of dailies, for generations to come, as the standards of self-promotion and humbuggery were more readily met than those of journalism. …