Baseball

In New York City, in the 1840s, people need a diversion from the "railroad pace" at which they work and live. They find it in a game of questionable origins. On June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, a team of well-dressed gentlemen, the Knickerbockers, play the first game of baseball. By 1856, the game is already being called "the national pastime," or simply, "Our Game." But the nation is about to be torn apart. And, in the midst of the Civil War, there is one thing that Americans North and South have in common: baseball.

In 1894, a sportwriter named Byron Bancroft "Ban" Johnson takes over a struggling minor league - the Western League - and turns it into a financial success. In 1900, he changes its name to the American League and begins talking about challenging the big city monopoly held by the National League. The revolution takes only three years. In 1903, the first World Series is played between the American League Boston Pilgrims and the National League Pittsburg Pirates.

Before and after World War I, a steady stream of immigrants lands on the shores of America. They want instantly to become American. To pursue the American dream. To play the American game. But even as thousands of new Americans pick up a ball for the first time, even as the country endures a world war, baseball is trying to endure a decade that includes the meanest, vilest, angriest player ever to step onto a field and a scandal that almost destroys the game.

The 1920s begin with America trying to recover from World War I and baseball trying to recover from the scandal of the 1919 World Series. America finds relief in the boom market and the Jazz Age. Baseball finds its own boom market in a player with a Jazz Age personality: a troubled youth from a Baltimore reformatory school who can hit a ball farther than anyone.

Throughout America, and even on the baseball diamonds in New York's Central Park, thousands of homeless people build shantytowns called "Hoovervilles." More than ever, America needs heroes. And even as it struggles to make it through the Depression, baseball provides them. But the heroes do not come only from the Major Leagues. The Negro Leagues being baseball to towns the Major leagues ignore - to people the Major Leagues spurn. To delight the fans, they develop an elaborate warm-up routine in pantomime; throwing and hitting an invisible ball so convincingly. spectators can't believe it's not real. It's called "shadow ball."

In Europe, in the Pacific, on the homefront, both African-Americans and whites fight to make the world safe for democracy. When the world ends, Major League Baseball becomes, in fact, what it has always claimed to be: the national pastime. But, at the beginning of the decade, Jackie Robinson's debut is still some years away. Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio sets a consecutive game-hitting streak that still stands. Ted Williams becomes the last man to hit .400. The once-lowly Brooklyn Dodgers win their first pennant. And world War II takes so much talent from the majors that the St. Louis Browns win a pennant.