Baseball seems always to have lived more in myth than in history. Children in England and the United States had been playing variants of the game for years such as rounders, one o’ cat, and base. In 1845, some young men in Manhattan organized themselves into the Knickerbocker Baseball Club and wrote down the rules of the game they were playing. These rules eventually became known as the sport of baseball.

Twenty years later dozens of baseball clubs in New York and Brooklyn, had made what they called the “national pastime” more popular than cricket, and the metropolis had become the country’s first baseball powerhouse. As baseball clubs were transformed into entertainment businesses, so grew their need for first-rate players who could attract paying crowds. The remarkable undefeatable season of the national touring Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869 paved the way for baseball’s full-blown professionalization in the 1876 formation of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. Although distinctions between players and their clubs (now really small businesses) had been hardening for years, the National League formalized the division, which has continued until today. Baseball

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