-based volunteer fire companies, militias, theater partisans, street gangs, and political factions. The National League explicitly appealed to more middle-class audiences by requiring its teams to charge fifty cents, ban the sale of alcohol, and refuse to play Sundays. ( Leal ,44)The rival American Association appealed to immigrant and working class audiences by charging a quarter, selling liquor, and playing Sunday ball. Despite the outrage with which baseball officials and writers treat baseball’s occasional betting scandals (in 1865 and 1877 as well as more famously in the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal and the 1989 banishment of Pete Rose), the game has never been completely free of the sporting underworld of gambling and low life. Even though they are all men with extraordinarily disciplined athletic skills, ballplayers, like most professional entertainers, frequently behave badly off the field. 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 at 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 was breached in 1947 by the careful planning and daring of Brookly...
