Once upon a time, the Midwest was the heart of baseball in America. This was about 100 years ago, after the game had spread out of the major eastern cities across the country. Many of baseball's greatest stars emerged from some of its most remote regions, and from agrarian backgrounds -- Walter Johnson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Dazzy Vance and Sam Crawford, just to name a few.
Bill James wrote about this in his "Historical Baseball Abstract." In his chapter on the 1910s, he noted, "The Irish tone of the game continued to wash out, and the game became to a considerable extent the property of Midwestern farm boys who came out of cow pasture Sunday leagues.