OK, who's read National Pastime?

Not a super page turner, but I found the chapter on the origin of the concept of a "league" fascinating; the fact that the English League was explicitly patterned on the National League was new to me.

(It's hard to imagine, now, that sports could be organized into anything other than leagues, so completely has this meme colonized team sports).

Exploding Vole, of course, did a great job of showing how baseball was responsible for incubating (proper) football in the US.