Recognizing the long historical association Americans had with a rural

Recognizing the long historical association Americans had with a rural environment and the late nineteenth-century fact of rapid urbanization, explain why baseball became the national sport.

What will be an ideal response?

ANSWER
Teams were identified with cities and players were usually from those cities. Fans identified easily with both. Baseball also used the symbols of rural and preindustrial America: no clock, green field, fences, bullpen, etc. Baseball symbolically blended rural and urban environments and values in America.