A Taste Of Baseball During The Interregnum

Yesterday afternoon the Brown Stocking boys faced the Grand avenue team at Solari's Park, and succeeded in presenting them with nine goose eggs. The crowd in attendance was not as large as it should be when two such clubs meet, and the slim number on hand can only be accounted for by the counter attraction at the Fair Grounds consisting of balloon ascensions, etc. When the crowd is small a base ball game is always tame. In the words of an old jockey, "a hoss race without the crowd to holler at the finish is just no hoss race at all." So it is with a ball game and the little crowd who gathered around the green diamond during the progress of yesterday's contest gazed at the beggarly array of empty benches, and thought of the olden time when "standing room only" was the general rule.

-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 16, 1879


Al Spink, in The National Game, wrote about how tough it was to draw a crowd during the Interregnum of 1878-1881 but how bad did the crowd have to be for something like the above to appear in a 19th century newspaper?