The Influence Of Baseball

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As of 2011, baseball games were viewed by an average of 1.01 billion people, second highest in all sports in America (Calcaterra). Baseball’s popularity still remains high today. Because it is one of America’s oldest sports. Major League Baseball’s (MLB) unwillingness to change its founding principles, has been one of the reasons that the sport has remained popular through time.
Thanks to gambling, baseball got its first big popularity boost. At the time, money was a big draw to the families coming out of the war. This was due to the focus on family and being able to provide for them, after a time of absence and low economic times. Baseball began as a game mainly for schoolboys, because older men didn’t view it as something they could make …show more content…

From its early days, baseball has few rules that have been change. Instead of changing rules, additions have been made to the game, according to Baseball Almanac, these additions include an umpire staff being introduces, a sacrifice bunt was statistically recognized, pitching distance was increased, the infield-fly rule was adopted and many more (Baseball). According to Michael Barone of the National Review, Americans tend to resist change, if they are not able to control the changes made (Barone), because of the values that were instilled in the men playing and betting on the game. The popularity of baseball has been called into question the past fifteen or so years, but statistics show that the game is still very popular, almost always a close second behind professional football and a decent gap between it and the third-place sport. According to Scott Lindholm, the number of people attending MLB games has had a slight decrease over the last few years for various reasons (Lindholm), but Ben Rains, with SportTechie, says that online attendance has drastically increased (Rains). This increase online can be contributed to the fact that now bets are able to be made online and people no longer need to attend the games. The online aspect has allowed more people to be reached in a larger area. Rains research shows that “the long grind of the nearly …show more content…

Even the debate on who founded baseball becomes a battle of individual achievement, between Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright. Doubleday, being a War vet, is known as the Father of Baseball, but doesn’t receive the recognition. Cartwright is in the Hall of Fame for his contributions, but it has been proven that many of his ideas were forged. John Thorn says that a Colorado mining engineer had been present at a schoolboy game where Doubleday used a stick to draw a diagram for the game. When this new evidence came to light that Cartwright may not have been the inventor of baseball, investigations took place to check the validity of the statement. As it has been demonstrated by experts, “Bruce Cartwright (grandson) inserted fabricated baseball exploits into a typescript of Alex Cartwright’s handwritten Gold Rush journal, which contains no baseball remarks and itself has been judged a forgery.” Although Cartwright is not considered the father of baseball his contributions in Knickerbocker Baseball Club helped shape the game to what we know it as today

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