from web site
Butchers, typesetters, draymen, bricklayers, and even clergymen organized baseball clubs. So did Irish Americans, German Americans, and African Americans. Professional baseball nurtured and deepened urban identities. "If we lead the huge city [New york city] in nothing else," crowed the Brooklyn Eagle as early as 1862, "we can beat her in baseball." Fans invested their feelings in their expert representative nines.
Louis (Missouri) Brown Stockings. "Buddies declined to recognize good friends, lovers ended up being estranged, and business was suspended." Even in the late 20th century, in an age more provided to cynicism, the successes and failures of expert groups continued to evoke strong sensations among local homeowners. For instance, throughout the 1990s, after having actually experienced urban decay and demoralization in the previous 20 years, Cleveland experienced a fantastic civic revival sustained in part by the success of the Indians baseball group.
The New York Yankees, who in the very first half of the 20th century were the essential agents of the huge city, of the East, of city America with its sophistication, and of ethnic and spiritual heterogeneity, ended up being synonymous with supernal success, while the St. Louis Cardinals became the essential champions of the Midwest, of small towns and the farms, of rural America with its simpleness, rusticity, and old-stock Protestant homogeneity.