In Morgan’s voice, Twain wrote: “In order to give the thing vogue from the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chose my nines by rank, not capacity. There wasn’t a knight in either team who wasn’t a sceptered sovereign. As for material of this sort, there was a glut of it always around Arthur. You couldn’t throw a brick in any direction and not cripple a king. Of course, I couldn’t get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn’t do that when they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that was the most they would do.”

He went on to list the names of the starting nines for his two fictional teams, the Bessemers and the Ulsters. Twain finished his baseball-specific prose with what seems like a reference to Spalding’s venture: “The first public game would certainly draw 50,000 people; and for solid fun would be worth going around the world to see. Everything would be favorable.”

Twain appears to have been so taken by Spalding’s exploits that he booked a trip to Australia in September 1895. During his visit, Twain was interviewed about “A Connecticut Yankee” and commented to journalists that “some very powerful political and social lessons are cleverly interleaved with the satire of the story.”

By the time Twain arrived there, baseball had gained a foothold. Harry Simpson, Spalding’s assistant who had gone to Australia for Spalding before the tour and stayed when it departed, started organizing games in 1889. Simpson had assembled and guided the Newark Baseball and Cricket Association in New Jersey in 1883, Clark said, before signing on as the captain and manager of a semiprofessional team in Asbury Park in 1887.

From 1889 to 1891, Simpson arranged numerous games, including interstate contests between South Australia and Victoria. Simpson even wrote to The Sporting News in 1890 to express his belief that baseball in Australia was making good progress and that he intended to bring another American team there to play his rapidly improving teams. But Simpson died of typhoid fever in September 1891 before he could do so.

For his part, Twain kept supporting baseball. The South Australian Register reported that he would attend a four-team, opening day doubleheader in October 1895, featuring North Adelaide versus Goodwood and Norwood versus South Adelaide if his business schedule permitted. (He did not go.)

Still, baseball grew significantly in Australia during the next century and produced a handful of major league players, most notably Joe Quinn, a player-manager for the St. Louis Browns in 1895, and the more contemporary All-Stars Grant Balfour and David Nilsson. But baseball never overtook cricket as Australia’s principal summer game, despite the efforts of those who followed Spalding and Simpson.