Baseball is most popular in East Asia and the Americas, although in South America its
popularity is mainly limited to the northern portion of the continent. In The Dominican
Republic, Puerto Rico, Japan, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, South Korea, and
Taiwan, it is one of the most popular sports. The United States is the birthplace of
baseball, where it has long been regarded as more than just a "major sport"; for many
decades, it has been popularly referred to as the "national pastime" and Major League
Baseball has been given a unique monopoly status by the Supreme Court of the United
States.[1] Although the three most popular professional team sports in the United States
are ball games—baseball, basketball and American football—baseball's historical
popularity was so great that even today the word "ballgame" in the United States almost
always refers to a game of baseball (except in the American South, where the word is
also used in association with football), and "ballpark" invariably refers to a baseball
field.
