The history of America's past time
Hi,
I need help on writing a research paper on why Baseball is America's past time, and also explain its history. I love baseball to death.. I could write about players and teams for days but what I need to talk about in my paper is why it is America's past time, the history of the game, etc.. Here is the information I have so far.. Can you help me modify it a little bit so that its organized, and sounds better?
Baseball is largely known as America's pastime, but has a fan base in several other countries as well. The history of baseball in Canada has remained closely linked with that of the sport in the United States. As early as 1877, a professional league, the International Association, featured teams from both countries. While baseball is widely played in Canada, and many minor league teams have been based in the country, the American major leagues did not include a Canadian club until 1969, when the Montreal Expos joined the National League as an expansion team. In 1977, the expansion Toronto Blue Jays joined the American League. The Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993, the first and still the only club from outside the United States to do so. In 2004, Major League Baseball relocated the Expos to Washington, D.C. where the team is now known as the Nationals.In 1871 the first professional baseball league was born. By the beginning of the 20th century, most of the bigger cities in the eastern United States had a professional baseball team. The teams were divided into 2 leagues, the National and American; during the regular season, a team played only against other teams within its league. The most victorious team in each league was said to have won the "pennant;" the 2 pennant winners met after the end of the regular season in the World Series. The winner of at least 4 games (out of a possible 7) was the champion for that year. This arrangement is still in place today, although the leagues are now subdivided and pennants are decided in post-season playoff series between the winners of each division.
The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. Oina, a very similar bat-and-ball traditional game played in Romania was mentioned for the first time during the rule of King Vlaicu Voda, in 1364. Typically, consensus was that today's baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, however a 2005 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, and historical evidence argues against that notion. Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century. The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery. It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing "base-ball," showing a baseball set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport.
The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford's contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris.
In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today's rules have evolved. He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball. While there are reports of Cartwright's club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the "New York Nine" defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.
On June 3, 1953, the United States Congress officially recognized Cartwright as the inventor of modern baseball. Semiprofessional baseball started in the United States in the 1860s. In 1869 the first fully professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went undefeated against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams. By the following decade, American newspapers were referring to baseball as the "National Pastime" or "National Game." The first attempt at forming a "major league" was the National Association, which lasted from 1871 to 1875. The "major league" status of the NA is in dispute among present-day baseball historians, and Major League Baseball does not include the NA among the major leagues. The National League, which still exists, was founded in 1876 in response to the NA's shortcomings. Several other major leagues formed and failed, but the American League, which evolved from the minor Western League (1893) and was established in 1901 as a major league, succeeded. The two leagues were initially rivals that actively fought for the best players, often disregarding one another's contracts and engaging in bitter legal disputes. A modicum of peace was established in 1903, and the World Series was inaugurated that fall, albeit without formal major league sanction or governance. The next year, the National League champion New York Giants did not participate, as their manager, John McGraw, refused to recognize the major league status of the American League and its champion, the Boston Americans who beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series. The following year, Giants' management relented, and actually led the formal establishment of rules that standardized the format of the World Series and made participation compulsory.
Compared with the present day, games in the early part of the 20th century were lower scoring and pitchers were more successful. The "inside game", whose nature was to "scratch for runs", was played more violently and aggressively than it is today.[2Ty Cobb said of his era especially, "Baseball is something like a war!" This period, which has since become known as the "dead-ball era", ended in the 1920s with several rule changes that gave advantages to hitters and the rise of the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth, who showed the world what power hitting could produce, altering the nature of the game.[27] Two of the changes introduced were the construction of additional seating to accommodate the rising popularity of the game, which often had the effect of bringing the outfield fences closer to the infield in the largest parks; and the introduction of strict rules governing the size, shape and construction of the ball which, coupled with superior materials becoming available following World War I, caused the ball to travel farther when hit.[28] The aggregate result of these two changes was to enable batters to hit many more home runs.
Major League baseball finally made it to the West Coast of the United States in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively.[35] The first American League team on the West Coast was the Los Angeles Angels, who were founded as an expansion team in 1961.
Pitchers dominated the game in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the early 1970s the designated hitter (DH) rule was proposed.[36] The American League adopted this rule in 1973, though pitchers still bat for themselves in the National League to this day. The DH rule now constitutes the primary difference between the two leagues.[
The 1994 baseball strike led to the cancellation of the World Series, and was not settled until the spring of 1995.. During this period, as well, many of the functions — such as player discipline and umpire supervision — and regulations that had been administered separately by the two major leagues' administrations were united under the rubric of Major League Baseball.
The number of home runs increased dramatically after the strike. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both surpassed Roger Maris's long-standing single season home run record in 1998. In 2001, Barry Bonds established the current record of 73 home runs in a single season. In 2007, Bonds became MLB's all-time home run leader, surpassing Hank Aaron's total of 755.. Even though all three sluggers (McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds) have been accused in the steroid-abuse scandal of the mid-2000s, their feats did do a lot at the time to bolster the game's renewed popularity.
Currently, baseball makes up around 20 percent of the franchise sports industry. The team with the highest average game attendance is the New York Yankees, with 51,848 spectators. The New York Yankees are closely followed by the Los Angeles Dodgers (46,400) and the New York Mets (42,327). The 30 Major League Baseball teams earned $5.11 billion in revenue in 2006.
Baseball is unique among American sports in several ways.. This uniqueness is a large part of its longstanding appeal and strong association with the American psyche. The philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen described baseball as a national religion. Many Americans believe that baseball is the ultimate combination of skill, timing, athleticism, and strategy. In this, baseball is similar to its cousin game cricket: in many Commonwealth nations, cricket and the culture surrounding it hold a similar place and affection to baseball's role in American culture.
In recent decades, observers have criticized professional baseball for the length of its games, with some justification as the time required to play a baseball game has increased steadily through the years. At the turn of the 20th century, games typically took an hour and a half to play. In the 1920s, they averaged just less than two hours, which eventually ballooned to 2 hours and 38 minutes in 1960.[38] Though this average dipped to 2 hours 25 minutes in 1975, [39] by the turn of the 21st century, games had become so long that Major League Baseball's goal in 2004 was to get the average game down to 2 hour and 45 minutes, after coming close in 2003 at 2 hours and 46 minutes.
The lengthening of games is attributed to longer breaks between half-innings for television commercials, increased offense, more pitching changes, and a slower pace of play. In response, Major League Baseball mandated a maximum break between half-innings, while instructing umpires to be stricter in enforcing speed-up rules and the size of the strike zone.
Baseball is fundamentally a team sport—even a franchise financially blessed enough to afford two or three Hall of Fame-caliber players cannot count on success. Yet it places individual players under great pressure and scrutiny. The pitcher must make good pitches or risk losing the game; the hitter has a mere fraction of a second to decide what pitch has been thrown and whether to swing at it. While managers and coaches can signal players to pursue certain strategies, no one can help the pitcher while he pitches or the hitter while he bats. If the batter hits a line drive, the outfielder, as the last line of defense, makes the lone decision to try to catch it or play it on the bounce. Baseball's history is full of heroes and goats—men who in the heat of the moment (the "clutch") distinguished themselves with a timely hit or catch, or an untimely strikeout or error.
Unlike the majority of sports, baseball playing fields can vary significantly, within certain guidelines, in size and shape of the field. With the exception of the strict rules on the dimensions of the infield, discussed above, the official rules[40] simply state that fields built after June 1, 1958 must have a minimum distance of 325 feet (99 m) from home plate to the fences in left and right field and 400 (121 m) feet to center. This rule (a footnote to official rule 1.04) was passed specifically in response to the fence at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was not originally designed for baseball, and thus was only 251 feet (77 m) to the left field pole (1 foot [0.3 m] over the bare minimum required by the rules). Major league teams often skirt this rule. For example, Minute Maid Park's Crawford Boxes are only 315 feet (96 m), and with a fence much lower than the famous "Green Monster" at Fenway Park which is labeled as 310 feet (94 m) away and 37-foot (11 m), two-inches tall. And there are no rules at all regulating the height of "fences, stands or other obstructions", other than the assumption that they exist. However, teams are required to obtain approval from the League Office when constructing new stadiums, or when proposing alterations.
Because of this flexibility, there are numerous variations in park configuration, from different lengths to the fences to uneven playing surfaces to massive or minimal amounts of foul territory. The differing styles create a unique sense of ambiance in each location, something that many fans find alluring (and even a source of civic pride). All of these factors, as well as local variations in altitude, climate and game scheduling, can affect the nature of the games played at those ballparks. Certain stadiums eventually get labeled as either a "pitcher's park" or a "hitter's park", depending on which side benefits more from the unique factors present. Some ballparks, notorious for both strong and frequently shifting wind currents, such as Chicago's Wrigley Field can be either, depending on the wind direction at any given time.
In the end, the lack of a consistent, standardized playing field has caused some debate, particularly when comparing players' statistics and career records. For example, hitting a fly ball to the warning track at one field may result in an easy catch for the outfielder, while at another the same hit could result in a home run.
As with many sports, and perhaps even more so, statistics are very important to baseball. Statistics have been kept for the Major Leagues since their creation, and presumably statistics were around even before that. General managers, baseball scouts, managers, and players alike study player statistics to help them choose various strategies to best help their team.
Statistics are more important to baseball than to other sports for a variety of reasons. Primary among them is the fact that every play has only a finite (and relatively limited) number of possible outcomes, unlike sports like hockey, basketball, soccer, and to a lesser extent American football, all of which are more fluid and open. This facilitates a statistical analysis of baseball, and allows a deeper level of mathematical study than that provided by other sports.
