When I was ten years old, during the decade when all the kids collected baseball cards for three months, I had an idea. I had a couple of friends who lived up the hill from me. One lived in a giant house, the son of a doctor and a lawyer; I spent countless days losing…
They brought baseball under the cover of cannon fire; within weeks of the Battle of Manila, soldiers were playing baseball in the fields, demonstrating their Americanness to the new Americans. Designed to supplant the local sport of cockfighting and instill cultural values and language, it proved a clumsy and effective propaganda, as the sport swept…