The first “play ball” of the season is still several weeks away in this part of the nation, but Major League Baseball’s spring training is finally under way in the warmer climates.

Of course, today’s technology can satisfy anyone’s year-round thirst for sports news, be it baseball, football, golf or almost any competition that one can imagine.

Norm Thomas, the well-known Lewiston Evening Journal sports editor and “Ye Sports Sandwich” columnist for decades beginning in the 1930s, wrote in 1947 about L-A’s earliest sports coverage.

“The first signs of anything local that could possibly be listed as sports was an announcement that some sleak (yes, spelled that way) pickerel, over three pounds, were being caught on the Androscoggin,” he said. That was an item from April of 1849. There was little else for local sports information for the next 10 years. Then, on Oct. 14, 1859, a detailed story about a Lewiston horse race appeared.

“It was run in the popular manner of the day, one horse on the track at a time, and with the competitors racing against time,” Thomas wrote.

Three trotters ran for prizes of $50, $30 and $20. Samuel Smith of Lewiston entered a roan stallion named “Lewiston Boy.” William Keene of Mechanic Falls entered “Brandywine,“ a black stallion, and Isaiah B. Pompilly of Auburn ran his brown mare, “Kettleball.”

The story gave detailed descriptions of several heats, with “Lewiston Boy” taking the top prize.

Thomas also researched early baseball stories. He quoted an eye-popping score when “a match game of baseball was played between the Androscoggins of Lewiston and the Bates College nine. The game resulted in a Bates win with a score of 82 to 20.”

The newspaper’s first box score printed on July 4, 1877, summarized the Bates College baseball club’s 28-4 win at Gorham, N.H., over the “K.K.K. baseball club,” possibly a team fielded by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Sports writers became common in the coming decades, and baseball’s colorful personalities made good copy. Many of them delighted in taking tongue-in-cheek swipes at the players. Arthur G. Staples, the acclaimed author of the Lewiston Evening Journal’s “Just Talks — on Common Themes,” wrote a five-column series on local baseball in the mid-1930s.

Staples told about the 1892 season, which was Lewiston’s second year in the New England League.

He said the season opened “with a program that was peculiar and, so far as I know, never duplicated. In that year, the teams drew all the new players by lot from the hat. Only one was a failure, and that was Donahue, a catcher.”

As Staples tells it, “We fired him, and quicker than a flash old Pop Anson of the Chicago White Sox, the greatest baseball manager that ever lived, spied him, put him behind the bat, and inside of six weeks had made one of the most famous catchers in the country — which showed how much we knew about baseball.”

That catcher (John Augustus “Jiggs” Donahue) was known as “Cyclone Donahue.” Staples’ story had plenty of exaggeration, a style that seems to fit very well with baseball reporting through history.

Another target of Staples’ imaginative wit was a player named Kellogg. The Lewiston Baseball Association had high hopes in 1891 for this newcomer who was supposed to be the team’s latest “phenom.”

Staples said Kellogg “was wanted by the Chicago White Sox, by the Boston Nationals, by the Cincinnati Reds and by the New York Giants … but Kellogg would go to none of them. Instead for some unknown reason he preferred to play in Lewiston.”

He eventually signed with the Lewiston team.

Staples went on to quote from his newspaper report on the first local appearance of the mighty Kellogg.

“He came. I shall never forget him as I saw him loom up for the first time on the little ball field on Sabattus street. He surprised me … nay, almost alarmed me … there was so much for the money. He had an overhang fore and aft. His person bulged in his clothes and when he ran his elastic physique bubbled up and down in his trouserloons. He got $100 advance money, and we had to put the looms to work, making cloth for his extra uniform.”

Broadcasters and writers, today as yesterday, are often inclined to attribute extraordinary importance to sporting events. There’s lots of money and tremendous audiences out there, but Staples reminds us not to take it all too seriously.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to davidsargent607.gmail.com.