from web site

Butchers, typesetters, draymen, bricklayers, and even clergymen organized baseball clubs. So did Irish Americans, German Americans, and African Americans. Professional baseball nourished and deepened metropolitan identities. "If we are ahead of the big city [New york city] in absolutely nothing else," crowed the Brooklyn Eagle as early as 1862, "we can beat her in baseball." Fans invested their feelings in their professional representative nines.
Louis (Missouri) Brown Stockings. "Pals refused to recognize good friends, fans became estranged, and service was suspended." Even in Related Source Here , in an age more offered to cynicism, the successes and failures of expert groups continued to stimulate strong sensations among local residents. For instance, throughout the 1990s, after having actually experienced city decay and demoralization in the previous 20 years, Cleveland experienced a great civic revival fueled in part by the success of the Indians baseball group.
The New York Yankees, who in the first half of the 20th century were the ultimate representatives of the big city, of the East, of metropolitan America with its elegance, and of ethnic and religious heterogeneity, ended up being synonymous with supernal success, while the St. Louis Cardinals became the essential champs of the Midwest, of small towns and the farms, of rural America with its simplicity, rusticity, and old-stock Protestant homogeneity.
