Sport: Who would have thought two academic economists, one American, the other British, working on behalf of a conservative US think-tank, would produce such a lively and lucid examination of the origins and evolutions of these games and present a thought-provoking analysis of what the two radically different professional structures might learn from each other?
And, of course, this wonderful book could not have been published at a more apposite time, as Malcolm Glazer brings the ruthless, profit-driven business thinking of US professional sport into a full-frontal collision with the ramshackle and struggling business model of European football. Will Glazer ever get his head around the absurd notion of promotion/relegation?
Zimbalist lectures in economics at Smith University and has published widely on baseball, while Szymanski lectures at Imperial College London and writes on the business strategy of football, including a particular study of the Italian experience.
Fortunately, our authors have a light touch, and a story that could have been as dry as, well, an economics lecture becomes an engaging and often humorous survey. Even the footnotes can be absorbing.
Of course, they are working with some prime material: robber barons, poolroom manipulations, illicit payments to players, crooked transfers, betting scams, drugs - and that's just in the 1870s, on both sides of the Atlantic.
There are many delicious titbits. Did you know that baseball was the national sport of Japan even before the first World War? Or that in 1874 the Boston Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics played exhibition matches in Dublin as part of a tour to Britain to proselytise the game to the cricketing public? Or that the first professional football league outside England was organised by none other than the owners of baseball's National League? Or that "the term 'shamateur' was coined in the 1880s to refer to noted gentleman cricketers such as WG Grace and their moneymaking scams"?
Indeed, the Gaelic Players Association could take an interest in the story of how amateur sport evolved into the professional game, with particular reference to wage structures and restrictions on player mobility, ie, loyalty to club or county.
The chapter titles hint at the wealth within: How Soccer Spread Around the World and Baseball Didn't, Why Baseball Clubs Make Money and Soccer Clubs Don't, and Watching the Money: Baseball and Soccer Broadcasting.
Along the way the study is illustrated by colourful anecdote, such as a comparison between the annual wages of Babe Ruth ($70,000) and his contemporary at Everton, Dixie Dean ($2,000). When Ruth learned of this, he could hardly believe it: "What a racket that is! What's the chances of me buying into one of those football or cricket clubs?"
The English Football League was founded in 1888 by William McGregor of Aston Villa, and there is evidence to suggest he took much inspiration from the structure of baseball, not least because of its commercial success.
But here we come to the fundamental distinction between the sports or, specifically, their league structures: baseball is run by owners whose prime interest is in profit, not success, whereas the directors of most football clubs have not, until recently, seen the generation of financial returns as their primary responsibility. They want silverware. "Thus baseball is not only the United States's national pastime; it is also a closed, legal and unregulated monopoly." In contrast, football is a wide open, highly competitive and yet highly regulated business.
In their conclusion, the authors look at the challenges facing baseball and football and examine what one can learn from the other. For example, football clubs are drowning in exorbitant player payrolls, but introducing restraints common to baseball, such as salary caps, luxury taxes, roster limits and draft rules, would prove incompatible with the dual structure of national leagues and the Champions League: any restraint that could benefit one competition could destabilise the other.
So, while Manchester United fans are rightly concerned about what Glazer's arrival may mean for the club and its traditions, the revolution in thinking about how football might be structured - which his takeover should force - could in the long run secure United's future as, for example, one of the world's biggest clubs playing in a closed, pan-European league.
My friends and colleagues in the sports department, Tom Humphries and Keith Duggan, could get six months' worth of columns out of this.
Joe Culley is an Irish Times sports journalist Joe Culley
National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer By Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist Brookings Institution Press. $26.95