A Row Among Base Ball Players. - On Sunday afternoon a game of base ball, between the Liberty and Artisan clubs, took place in the northern part of the city. During the progress of the game, some difficulty occurred, which resulted in a fight, in which a young man named Pierce was struck in the head with a bat, and seriously injured. The police arrested a young man named Hart, who in trying to escape got also hit on the head and seriously cut. We could not ascertain definitely the origin of the difficulty.
-Missouri Republican, November 6, 1866
Stories like this, about fighting and injuries during a baseball game, are rather common in the sporting press of the 1860s and, usually, the stories revolve around somebody hitting somebody else with a baseball bat. I can't tell you how many times I've read variations of this story. These kinds of stories got picked up nationally, especially if they involved a fatality. I really don't know if this was because the press liked the sensational angle of the story or if they were trying to say something about the kind of people who played baseball or if the stories got play simply because of the general popularity of the game. All I know is that somebody could collect all of these stories and have enough material to write a nice paper or possibly a book.
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