The "Telegram" barely made ends meet; the "Daily News" was by far the most successful newspaper in Chicago. Instead of longer editorials, White preferred pithy comments ranging from sentence to paragraph length, and gave Dunne training in this. Some of the elements of Dunne's experience at the "Daily News" may have resonated in his later Mr. Dooley pieces. Editor White, a humorist of local note and a racing fan, had invented a character, "the horse reporter", who dispenses earthy wisdom to a Chicago newsroom's visitors, and had written a series of sketches about an Irish family living on Archer Avenue, Dooley's future home. On the "Daily News" staff was Eugene Field, a humorist and easily the best-paid journalist in Chicago from the 1880s until his 1895 death. Field's work tended to be noncontroversial, contrasting with the Dooley pieces, but Field's success proved that newspaper humor could pay. Editor White assigned Dunne to general news reporting, and tried to allow him to write special features, which he preferred, disliking the need for legwork in general reporting. Sometime before 1886, Dunne took his mother's maiden name as his middle name, and in 1888, reversed the two names, for Finley Peter Dunne. Dunne's city was at this time baseball-mad over the success of the Chicago White Stockings, and in the spring of 1887, the "Daily News" started covering baseball games (rather than merely printing the final score) and White assigned Dunne. Both at home games and on the road, Dunne sent commentary, usually of the first six innings or so, the most that could be set in type before the six o'clock edition, the final one for the day (the scores from the later innings were punched into the printing plate). According to James DeMuth in his book on Chicago newspaper humorists, Dunne, together with "Chicago Herald" sports reporter Charles Seymour, "largely shaped the modern forms of American sportswriting". Rather than dry summaries, as had been common to that point, Seymour and Dunne adopted ballplayer slang as technical terms. One term that Dunne is credited with coining is "southpaw" to describe a left-handed pitcher; in the White Stockings ballpark, a pitcher faced west as he threw to the plate; thus he threw with the arm on the south side. Dunne was no baseball fan, and saw that many players were well-muscled but ignorant; this would cause his most famous literary creation, Mr. Dooley, to remark of one young man's career, "fractions drove him from school, and the vagrancy laws drove him to baseball".