Yeah, but you can add the Louisville (KY)Bats.
Seems to me that rugby is more of a regional sport than others, being played in the northeast. Baseball is pretty universal. There may be pro hockey teams in the south, but as far as high school and college goes, it’s a wasteland. Even the west coast is pretty devoid of college hockey, Arizona State may join the Big Ten as a hockey-only school just as Notre Dame is now. (The Big Ten has a lacrosse-only school in Johns Hopkins).
College baseball is bigger in the south than the north. Better weather during college baseball season, so much so that northern teams have to travel south and west during the early part of the season to play a steady diet of road games. Southern schools have a huge edge in recruiting and in getting more home games.
Auto racing (NASCAR) is definitely still much more popular in the Southeast than anywhere else in the country. They do some races in New England and on the West Coast, but the fanbase and interest are mostly in the South.
NC had around 40 minor league teams in the 40s. Even now there are around 10.
The rugby team at the University of California is a major participant in the sport. The club has 28 national titles, including twelve consecutive championships from 1991 to 2002, five more consecutive titles from 2004 to 2008, and back-to-back titles in 2010 to 2011 and 2016 to 2017.
Another nitpick - that’s Gwinnett Stripers. Lots of jokes in the Atlanta area about mispronunciations, when they changed their name.
While I get the general point about AAA, El Paso is decidedly not in The South. But I’d also say that the average trip to any one of those AAA games would definitely be cheaper and probably more fun than a Braves game.
Thanks for the info. The only times I’ve ever seen it were all northeast schools.
I think for the purpose of the OP, we can count El Paso, since Texas was in the Confederacy. And the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers in MLB have already been mentioned.
Indeed, the Negro Leagues were VERY southern in content. Almost all the greatest players were from the South; the only one I can think of offhand who wasn’t was Oscar Charleston, who was from Pennsylvania (well, and Martin Dihigo, who was from Cuba, which is certainly south but not The South.)
Sorry about my couple of days’ absence; and thanks for the continuing assortment of information.
I have a theory – which I gather is to some extent borne out by things J.K. Rowling has stated – that JKR is, like myself, the reverse of a sports fan; she tends to find wearisome, the sheer hard-to-ignore volume of those who love sports’ going-on about same. Her invention of the wizards’ game Quidditch, can be seen as gentle mockery of conventional sports and the way huge numbers of people are perceivedly obsessed with them. Quidditch is a patently insane sport which just plain doesn’t actually work; but which nevertheless has, in Wizarding-World terms, a very large number of impassioned devotees, many of whom have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game’s minutiae, and never shut up about same.
Most interesting about Chadwick – a new figure to me – thank you. It’s always struck me that baseball resembles cricket, more than any other sport in the world of which I’m aware: “cross-fertilization” between the sports via Chadwick, which you describe, is of much interest. Cricket’s 19th-century popularity in the US, initially surprised me (we tend to think that it’s too crazy a game to appeal to anyone other than the English !); but there popped up in my memory, a passing reference in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Redskins: Flashy mentions that one of the “supporting cast” in Custer’s disastrous 1876 campaign (Benteen?) was a cricket fan.
Very true – that was just me wondering re Doubleday (assuming his actually playing his attributed role in “our time-line”), from my point of view outside the SV universe. (Memo to self – get out more :o?)
Thanks re this – a Turtledove “short” that I hadn’t come across. (I gather that Harry is a keen in-real-life baseball fan.) Further “Turtledovery” – with assorted instances offered in this thread, of baseball luminaries who were from the South; I recalled that in the Worldwar series: the captain of Yeager’s baseball team (whose name escapes me at present – he’s also an old soldier, who comes to fight from start to finish in the war against the invading Lizards) is from a Deep South state.
Yeah, Turtledove is s big baseball fan. One of his early stories "The Rosd not Taken features characters all named for a particular team’s lineup (I forget which team).
I’ve read, and liked, The Road Not Taken; but being neither American nor a sports fan, I’ve been oblivious to the baseball connection !
I didn’t notice either - but I remember someone in the Analog letter column commenting about it. Here’s an analysis someone wrote: On "The Road Not Taken" Character Names | Turtledove | Fandom
“The crew of the Ares III have a connection to the New York Giants”
“The United States Army platoon that the POV Billy Cox served in has a connection to the Brooklyn Dodgers/Los Angeles Dodgers”
“The two researchers also have a connection to the Brooklyn Dodgers”
Thanks again. I take it that the alien invaders, the Roxolani, are not included – one assumes that they don’t have baseball on their home-world 
. Though I recall that in Worldwar, Harry has instances of “Lizard” aliens – POWs and / or voluntary dwellers in human territory – playing baseball, to which they seem naturally well-suited.
Yes. Hard to believe, but the first cricket international match was between the U.S. and Canada, in 1844. The first English eleven to make an international tour came to North America in 1859.
Years ago, I worked with a man who had played high-level amateur (and possibly pro, if memory serves) cricket in Barbados. One night while cleaning up, he explained the game to me. I came away thinking that the only fundamental, important difference between baseball and cricket was which aspect of the game dominated: batting in cricket, pitching in baseball. Otherwise, the sports are essentially identical, in all but superficial ways. For example, like cricket fielders, baseball fielders are permitted to place themselves anywhere on the field they choose (with the exception of the pitcher and the catcher). A century and a half of experience has shown that the general placement of fielders - a man on each base, a shortstop between second and third, and an outfielder in each field - is the most effective defense, but there’s no rule saying the players must take those positions. And even in a game, you’ll see the infielders line up in different spots, depending on the batter.
Cricket has spin bowlers, who rely on making the ball move in a deceptive manner, and fast bowlers, who overwhelm with speed; in baseball, this is the difference between “control” and “power” pitchers.
In cricket, a ball hit over the boundary is an automatic six runs; in baseball, a ball hit over the fence is automatically one to four runs, depending on the number of batters on base.
According to my friend, the two sports even have a similar pitching/bowling strategy; one ball aimed high and close to the batter/batsman, to shake him up, then the next lower and farther away (in baseball, called “high and tight, then low and away”.)
As I said, the only fundamental difference I could see was that baseball is weighted to pitching, whereas cricket is weighted to batting.The fact that in cricket, a leg before wicket results in dismissal of the batsman, where the result of the baseball equivalent, a hit batsman, is a free base, I think demonstrates this difference. I suspect the dominance of pitching in baseball derives from the fact that a round bat hitting a round ball has a much smaller “sweet spot”, that will result in a hit, compared to a flat, rectangular bat that has three faces with which to hit the ball*. Cue the argument about which is harder, hitting in cricket or hitting in baseball.
TL;DR, after listening to my Barbadian friend’s explanation, I was able on a subsequent visit to New Zealand to watch and understand a match between the Black Hats and Pakistan, based both on his exegesis and my own knowledge of baseball. Of course, this was twenty or so years ago, and I’m sure I’ve misremembered or misunderstood things. This being the SDMB, a cricket or baseball expert will be along directly, to correct anything I’ve gotten wrong.
Albert Spalding, the sporting goods merchant and former pitcher, who organized the National League and chaired a commission investigating the history of baseball, essentially made up the story of Abner Doubleday having invented the game. There’s no evidence that he had anything whatsoever to do with the foundation of the sport.
*Lest anyone think I’m biased, being an American, I’ll say that fielding is a lot harder in cricket, where players make acrobatic catches without big leather gloves, which impresses me no end.