Where It All Begins
Greatly outnumbering professional athletes, millions of non-professional youth athletes participate in thousands of different sports leagues and teams around the nation. The passion and dedication demonstrated by young athletes every day while practicing and playing their chosen sports illustrates the true origins of America’s fascination with professional sports. Fittingly, the first American postage stamp to depict a team oriented athletic event in action featured kids playing a sandlot game of baseball. This stamp, the 3-cent Baseball Centennial Issue, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the creation of baseball by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York.
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
—Actor James Earl Jones, as Terrence Mann in the 1989 film Field of Dreams
