Early Press Pin questions

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Posted By: Alan Elefson

Hi-
Thanks for the help David! I dug through the scrapbook a little bit more, and I discovered that this man (Walter Seeley) was hired in part to be a football expert for the newspaper. In the scrapbook there is a newspaper cutout showing coming features in that week's Sunday edition. The date of September 20th 1895 is written on the cutout, and the section on college football is underlined where it refers to an expert, and he wrote, "that's me" next to it. Harvard played U Penn that year on November 16th. He was only an editor at the Springfield Republican for about a year (before he went to another newspaper), so I believe this press pin was issued for that game.
Does anyone know of any earlier press identifiers issued solely for a sporting event? I would assume there was some form of press pass for major league baseball writers before 1895, and if anyone has any examples to share I would love to see them. To further narrow the field, has anyone ever seen an earlier football press identifier issued for a specific game?
Thanks in advance,
Alan Elefson
aelefson@hotmail.com