Documentaries
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Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
ask the average American who, William Howard Taft Waas or Herbert Hoover. And you might be greeted with a puzzled stare. Say, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth, however, and the reaction will almost certainly be much more enthusiastic. For almost 150 years, baseball has been America's national pastime. No other sport incorporates strategy and strength, force and finesse as seamlessly as baseball does. The heroes of the game are larger than life, appearing in movies, on television and radio and in the packs of cards both Children and adults collect to remember the Great American Game. And few things are more American than baseball, which is often included alongside mom and apple pie. When we talk about what makes this country great, of course, what most people don't know is that baseball isn't American at all. In fact, the first form of the sport was actually invented in Russia long before it was important to our shores. On a cold January day in the heart of Germany, a group of men gathered in an opulent retreat to feast upon delicacies and fine wines unimaginable to most who lived in a world ravaged by war. Here they would experience the best comfort and luxury their nation and those that had plundered had to offer. Amidst the excess and the warmth of fires carefully maintained by the villas attendance, these men would draw up a plan which would result in the greatest crime humanity had ever witnessed. Across an ocean in a dimly lit office enjoying a lunch of military rations, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was making plans of his own, though he would not be able to prevent the slaughter being devised in that German villa. The strategies he began to assemble that January would ultimately prevent it from being extended to all corners of the earth.