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

Currently, baseball is integrated in that there are large numbers of African-American and Latin players; it is not unusual for a starting lineup to have a minority of whites. This is accomplished because of baseballs history and the changes it has invoked. For this very reason, ballplayers are willing to leave their differences outside the ballpark and play the game. Still today, we think of baseball as “America’s past time,” because we accept differences and concentrate on one goal, baseball. Baseball’s history is not an inevitable march of dusty names, dates and places, but it’s a precarious, tilting ride that could have taken baseball to any number of destinations.

Alongside the game’s reputation as an upright, all-American pastime, its culture continues to have a whiff of the unrespectable. Baseball has also had an archaic aura throughout most of its history, the heyday of modern industrializing America. It enshrined craft excellence at precisely the time industrialists were destroying craft production. As the traditional foundations of manhood were subjected to enormous strains, mostly young men who played baseball worried about devoting so much time to a child’s game and tried to distinguish their “manly sport” from “ boyish play.” Although baseball’s origins are urban, its myth is powerfully, stubbornly rural. While city populations swelled in the late nineteenth century, and mass entertainment was born at places like Coney Island, baseball fans flocked to watch a game featuring individuals, isolated and surrounded by the green grass of ballparks. The major league color barrier wa

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