The United States is credited with developing several popular sports, including some (such as baseball, gridiron football, and basketball) that have large fan bases and, to varying degrees, have been adopted internationally. But baseball, despite the spread of the game throughout the globe and the growing influence of Asian and Latin American leagues and players, is the sport that Americans still recognize as their “national pastime.” The game has long been woven into the fabric of American life and identity. “It’s our game,” exclaimed the poet Walt Whitman more than a century ago, “that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game.” He went on to explain that baseball has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. It is the place where memory gathers. Perhaps Whitman exaggerated baseball’s importance to and its congruency with life in the United States, but few would argue the contrary, that baseball has been merely a simple or an occasional diversion. Continue reading at Britannica
Baseball Almanac: The History of Major League Baseball (Baseball Almanac)
Baseball Stats and History (Baseball Reference)
Baseball Savant (Major League Baseball)
A Brief History of the Baseball (Smithsonian)
Bringing Baseball History to Center Field (Historic Baseball)
How Baseball Put Its Stamp on the American Psyche (Smithsonian Magazine)
