The History of Baseball

Baseball has been, most often for better but occassionally for worse, the American game.
It has given our people rest and recreation, myths and memories, heroes, history and hope.
It has mirrored our society, sometimes propelling it with models for democracy, community, commerce,
and common humanity, sometimes lagging behind with equally instructive models of futility and resistance to change.
As our national game, baseball in no small measure defines us as Americans, connecting us with our
countrymen across all barriers of generation, class, race, and creed.

Baseball in America is more than a game, but it is first and foremost about play.
A fact obscured amid today's free agency, salary caps, strikes, and threatened cataclysm.
Some 150 years ago, an overly solemn America was first indebted to baseball for the freedom it gave to play.
Let us take a look at how child's play grew to become our national pastime.