Harold Keith on Baseball

“Baseball is older than the American nation itself. There are tales about Abner Doubleday's "devising" the game at Coopertown, New York, in 1839. But long before General George Washington struck out Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, sports-hungry American colonists living along the eastern seaboard were playing it. Robert W. Henderson, a sportsman who is also an executive officer of the New York Public Library, has produced inimpeachable evidence to show that the game is closely related to the old West England sport of rounders, and that there was a baseball game in England as early as 1744.”

“Now its rootage and growth are even more vast. Not only do the major and minor leagues play to larger crowds than ever before, but baseball has spawned a lusty manchild- softball- that leads the nation in outdoor sports attendance. Other nations have adopted baseball. The Japanese player is learning fast. Already he is a skillful fielder and an alert base-runner. American teams touring Japan report that nearly everybody there is playing baseball. Japanese youngsters are on their way to the baseball grounds early in the morning and play all day. A game was played in the rain at Kokura in 1934 at which eleven thousand spectators knelt in the outfield in water up to their hips. Twenty thousand saw this game and some were at the gates as early as five o'clock in the morning.”

“The game quickly worked its way over the Allegheny mountains and across the western prairies until soon it obtained a permanent footing in every town and village in the land. It achieved its most lasting popularity before radio and paved roads destroyed the isolation of the American small town. In those days baseball was the most popular game at recess at the little frame country school and also the two-story brick town school. It also furnished a clean and exciting Sunday afternoon recreation for hundreds of active young men who had no other outlet for muscular energy, and also for thousands of spectators who proudly followed their nines to the small plank grandstands at the edge of the village or in the vacant lots of the cities, and, while supporting them zealously and vociferously, acquired for themselves health and pleasure and an escape from the routine boredom of their own lives that was an invaluable tonic as they faced their jobs the following Monday morning.”