The Sporting News Publishes Its First Issue

On March 17, 1886, Alfred Henry Spink published the first issue of The Sporting News from his office in St. Louis, Missouri. The eight-page weekly cost five cents and carried a subscription rate of two dollars per year. Advertising ran twenty cents per agate line.

The debut issue was not exclusively about baseball. The longest story on page one covered harness racing, and a separate piece discussed professional wrestling. But Spink's ambitions were clear. He intended to build a newspaper around the national game, and within a few years the publication earned the nickname "The Baseball Paper of the World."

Spink, a Quebec native who had settled in St. Louis, proved a tireless promoter. He had helped finance Chris von der Ahe's St. Louis Browns of the American Association and understood the commercial appetite for baseball coverage. The paper was an immediate success, though its popularity overwhelmed Spink. He soon brought his brother Charles aboard to share the editorial load, and the family's involvement with the publication continued for generations. Charles's son J.G. Taylor Spink eventually became the paper's most prominent editor, running it from 1914 until his death in 1962.

For more than a century, The Sporting News served as baseball's paper of record, publishing box scores, standings, statistics, and analysis that no other outlet matched in depth. Its annual awards, including the Sportsman of the Year, became part of the game's institutional fabric. The paper eventually expanded to cover all sports, but its roots were planted on this St. Patrick's Day in 1886, when a small weekly in St. Louis bet that baseball could sustain a national readership.