“…In the United States baseball has been played professionally since 1869, with the modern iteration of the game generally agreed to have begun with the "live ball" era in 1920, the same year the Negro Leagues were founded. Throughout its history, baseball has been used to promote democratic values as well as ideologies inherent to US national identity, religious expression, economic opportunity, and self-reliance (Butterworth, 2010(Butterworth, , 2019Carroll, 2006;Everbach, 2005;Von Burg & Johnson, 2009). Writers covering the exploits of players and teams in the press became an important part of newspaper coverage, serving as the primary documentation of professional baseball for millions of readers.…”