Twenty years later dozens of baseball clubs in New York and Brooklyn, had made what they called the "national pastime" more popular than cricket, and the metropolis had become the country's first baseball powerhouse. ... Baseball has been America's most popular sport for so long mainly because it has successfully straddled some of the nation's most important cultural divisions. ... Despite the outrage with which baseball officials and writers treat baseball's occasional betting scandals (most famously in the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal and the 1989 banishment of Pete Rose), th...

• Word Count: 1094
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate