April 7, 2000

'Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Make a film about the Black Sox scandal and you have to have the kid. Forget the historical record, forget even "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's own recollections, the tyke must be there. It's baseball. And any movie about the fixing of the 1919 World Series must have a crestfallen boy pleading: "Say it ain't so, Joe."

Americans love their baseball myths. Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball -- its origins are murkier -- but fans still imagine its creation on the fields of Cooperstown. The

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