How and why Americans chose baseball over its early rival, cricket, as the national pastimeGeorge B. Kirsch takes us back to amateur playing fields around the country to re-create the excitement of the early matches, the players, clubs, and their fans. As a narrative history, Baseball and Cricket places the growing popularity of the two sports within the social context of mid-nineteenth-century American cities. The book"s comparative analysis follows baseball"s transition from a leisure sport to a commercialized, professional enterprise and offers the first complete discussion of the early American cricket clubs.A volume in the series Sport and Society, edited by Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts