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→The Sport Today
==The Sport Today==
By the first decade of the 20th century, players were now becoming national superstars. This included Honus Wagner, who was adept at stealing bases as well as hitting. One major difference in the game was the ball itself. Baseballs in the early 20th century were expensive, making a single ball often used in an entire game. Even hitting the baseball out of the park required the ball to be retrieved if possible. This allowed pitchers to use this to their advantage, as they contributed to disfiguring the ball, making it harder to hit. Pitchers such as Cy Young began to dominate the game. This was also the period when larger ballparks were now being built, accommodating the much larger audiences coming to games. In the 1910s, new hitters, such as Ty Cobb, emerged and made the game now more offensive-oriented. However, the biggest event was the so-called Black Socks scandal of 1919 between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. The Chicago White Sox were by far the best team but purposley lost the World Series by taking bribes.
The big turnaround though came with the Babe Ruth era, as his slugging and popularization of the home run in the 1920s now made baseball an internationally known game and synonymous with the United States. The combination of radio, increased offense, and the larger than life appearance of Babe Ruth popularized the game to a level unseen for any other sport in the United States. This was time commonly called as the "Golden Age" of baseball, as its popularity was at a frenzy level across the country.
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