Baseball seems always to have lived more in myth that in history. Children in England and the United States had been playing variants of the game for years such as rounders, one o’ cat, and base. In 1845, some young men in Manhattan organized themselves into the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and wrote down the rules of the game they were playing. Twenty years later dozens of baseball clubs in New York and Brooklyn, and their journalist brethren, had made what they called the “national pastime” more popular than cricket, and ....