I don't know what to say. As much as I enjoy watching the Durham Bulls, I was spectactularly ignorant of baseball's history, other than having some notion that it was a 19th-century thing.
Rivka fixes this, with a discussion of it's late-18th-century appearance in Jane Austen novels, and further references–ones that also mention Morris-dancing, natch–from the earliest parts of that century.
And the Steven Jay Gould quote on the page uses the word tendentious. So there.