Baseball

American society never had an aristocracy, a state-sponsored church, or a rigid class system. What it does have is baseball. Now, in Baseball: A History of America's Game, Benjamin Rader reexamines the story of the pastime that helped shape American society.
From baseball's days as "the only game in town" through today's wave of Hollywood sports nostalgia, America's greatest heroes have been ballplayers - Babe Ruth, Joe Dimaggio, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron. Rader analyzes baseball's mythology - one complete with rites, shrines, and even a creation myth.
For decades, Rader suggests, a city's ball club was perhaps the fullest expression of its identity. Today, in the era of suburbia, Soloflex, and slow-motion replays, America has changed, and baseball's role with it. Yet in many ways the game's essence has stayed quietly constant: Three strikes, three outs. The confrontation of pitcher versus batter. The illicit temptation of the bookmaker. The drama of the bottom of the ninth.
Now as before, baseball remains America's game. This is the first book to show why.

Benjamin G. Rader, James L. Sellers Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is the author of American Ways: A Brief History of American Cultures and American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, among other books