Baseball Bits

Just finished reading "Baseball Bits" by Dan Schlossberg. The 238-page soft-cover book is terrific for the person with an interest in baseball and history. "Bits" is right -- each segment is just a few sentences long.

Did you know that the first professional baseball team played its games in 1869? They were so good that they won 69 games in a row (after all, every other team they played were amateurs). But to me the more standout fact is some of those players undoubtedly knew people who had been in the Civil War. In fact the first reference to baseball as the "national pastime" was put in print in 1857, four years prior to the start of the war. Had the conflict ended differently, baseball may have been the national pastime of two countries (at least until NASCAR surpassed it in the Confederacy)!