As a lecturer on river cruise ships I often tell stories of Mark Twain,  His life was filled with amazing adventures, failures, and people.  Seldom do we associate him with sports but as you can read in the newspaper account copied here - Mark Twain, while not an athlete, still had a chance to participate in the game with an umpiring experience.

Add to that his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court where he wrote: "In Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” a time-traveling American brought baseball to 6th-century England, where arguments with umpires were robust: “The umpire’s first decision was usually his last. ... When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular.” 

"His Yankee, Hank Morgan, exclaims of favored ballplaying knights: “The very best man in my subordinate nine! What a handy right-fielder he was!” and “My peerless short-stop! I’ve seen him catch a daisy-cutter in his teeth!” An armor-plated runner sliding into a base, Twain wrote, “was like an iron-clad coming into port.”

At a banquet for Albert Spalding he said, 

“Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.”

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), April 8, 1889.

And in Tom Sawyer he wrote: 

There was no joy in life for poor Tom. He put away his bat and his ball and dragged himself through each day.”

Mark Twain, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1885.

The Philadelphia Times reported him toting a package onto the field and declaring that it contained dynamite. When his decisions “gave dissatisfaction,” the article stated, “he coolly placed one foot upon it, and the hubbub immediately ceased.”