Many believe that baseball was originally a bucolic game played by gentlemen farmers, country boys who needed weekend diversion after a string of 12-hour days mowing and bailing hay. You'll see daguerreotypes and drawings of young ladies sitting around on grass-covered embankments, nibbling on chicken legs and sipping white wine while their children gambol in the background and their husbands run the bases in the foreground.

Obviously those are real images. But those bearded guys in the funny uniforms ain't farm hands. They are stockbrokers and merchandisers and subway diggers and flim-flam artists, city boys who needed weekend diversion to charge up for another week of battling owners, bosses, competitors, police. Those babies were no less hard-nosed than Lou Piniella or Jorge Posada.

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