Originally an early nineteenth century variation of a venerable English game, baseball, by the late twentieth century, had developed into America's "national pastime," a game so indelibly entwined with American culture and society that diplomat Jacques Barzun once remarked, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."

Baseball lore places the origins of baseball in Cooperstown, a small town in upstate New York, where Abner Doubleday, a West Point cadet and Civil War hero, allegedly invented the bat-and-ball game in 1839. In reality, the sport was neither new nor indigenous. The game that ultimately developed into modern baseball was in fact a modified version of rounders, an English sport imported to the colonies prior to the American Revolution. Early forms of baseball were remarkably similar to rounders. Both games involved contending teams equipped with a ball as well as a bat with which...