The quintessential American sport, shoved aside by football in the 1960s and the popularity of basketball in the 1980s, is now enjoying a renaissance in the early twentyfirst century. It is the stuff of American dreams, the sport of literature and of the pastoral life. Its birth is shrouded in conflicting claims, but popular myth and effective marketing have placed it before the Civil War, in Cooperstown, New York, a small village redolent of America’s literary past and the Main Street ideal, on which the hallowed Hall of Fame recounts the sacred story Football was largely associated with and still remains central to college life, not becoming a successful national professional sport until the advent of national broadcast television; neither did basketball, with urban roots that have remained its vital core. But baseball, the oldest of these three nineteenth-century inventions, developed by 1845 into a regular form, the “national pastime,” was a profitable professional sport within the first generation of its appearance.

The major leagues, a term that effectively reduced its competitors to minor league and dependent status, trace their roots to 1875 when the National Association of Professional Baseball Players formed in 1871, and, controlled by the players, was replaced by the owner-dominated National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (NL). The second of the two major leagues, the American League (AL), emerged in 1900. From 1903 to 1953 both consisted of eight teams that played 154 games a year. A season-ending contest, the World Series, played continuously for ninety years until the owners canceled it during a labor dispute in 1994. African Americans and other players of color were excluded from the National League by the late 1880s. They formed their own Negro Leagues that flourished until just after the Second World War when Jackie Robinson broke the NL color line (1947).

These leagues built their teams in a belt of Eastern cities that would reach only as far west as Pittsburgh, Chicago and St Louis. Not until after the Second World War were the further Midwest, West and, much later, the South included in major league expansion. The move in 1958 of two of New York’s three teams, the Giants (NL) to San Francisco and especially the Brooklyn Dodgers (NL) to Los Angeles, signified and cemented the rise of the West and demise of the East in the American consciousness.

The names and performances of baseball players, divided between pitchers and all other players, and the statistical measures that allow decontextualized comparisons over a span of a century resound through the game’s history as embodiments of its personality.

There were the early pitching stars: Cy Young, who won the most games and after whom the award for the best pitcher is named; Christy Mathewson, the handsome gentleman of the New York Giants (NL); Grover Cleveland Alexander, the crusty left-handed competitor; Walter Johnson, the fire-balling stalwart of the largely losing team, the Washington Senators (Alabama); and Lefty Grove of the Philadelphia Athletics, the man who got stronger as the game went on. But it is the hitters who most captured the adulation of the public: Tyrus (Ty) Raymond Cobb, the battler of the Detroit Tigers (AL); Lou Gehrig, the iron man and “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio, the elegant center fielder who married Marilyn Monroe (both of the New York Yankees); and Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter” of the Boston Red Sox whose prodigious talents have made him into the god of hitting. All are, however, dwarfed by the giant shadow of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, whose name has entered the language as an adjective for outsized. His accomplishments changed the game into one based on the home run or long ball, resulting in a sudden score with one swing of the bat, instead of a slower game. Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, became known as the “house that Ruth built,” the most venerable of baseball’s venues.

In the 1950s, baseball entered a golden age, with powerful new hitters like the great center-fielders Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees and Willie Mays of the New York/San Francisco Giants, who redefined the dichotomy of speed or power, leading the way for the modern superstar who combined both traits. The spread of the major leagues also led to a new kind of baseball stadium as an alternative to the ballpark, which was often outside the central city, surrounded by parking lots and not reachable by public transportation. Still, major-league baseball had purposely resisted innovations almost since the time of Babe Ruth. Segregated games were played only during the daytime into the mid-1930s (the technology for playing at night predated the First World War and was used to great effect in the Negro Leagues), shunning television broadcasts or convenient starting times, tying players to one team through the reserve clause system in a restraint of trade sanctioned by US congressional legislation, and its concomitant “farm” system of minor leagues, which, as the term implies, recreated a serf-like connection to one “organization.” Add to that the resistance to the expansion of the two eight-team leagues in the face of large population growth. These were all more or less conscious attempts to keep the game “pure,” and together helped to push the game into crisis by the early 1960s.

African American and Latino players, such as Roberto Clemente, helped to end the mindless control of tradition and revive flagging interest in baseball. Not all teams were integrated until 1958 and 1959 when Philadelphia and then Boston, two mediocre and rabidly racist organizations, finally and reluctantly accepted their first players of color.

Curt Flood, of the St. Louis Cardinals, forced the end of the reserve clause system by filing suit to void his trade to the inhospitable Philadelphia team, which helped lead to the skyrocketing of salaries through the ability to be released from unfair contracts. Teams like the Cincinnati Reds, “the Big Red Machine,” the Oakland Athletics and the Baltimore Red Sox wrested the title from the traditional and perennial world-series champions, the New York Yankees, in the 1960s and 1970s. The number of teams expanded exponentially, almost doubling between 1960 and the end of the century leading to the realignment of teams into divisions and the introduction of a playoff system. Increasing labor and management troubles have attended the growth in prosperity and renewed popularity of the game, with several work stoppages and a major strike in 1994–5. But further innovations, inter-league play and the explosion of home-run hitting in the late 1990s, led by Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr, have eclipsed some of the marks set by Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, and restored baseball to its central role in the popular imagination.