1869.

A faction of amateur American baseball clubs, including the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the Boston

Red Stockings, and the St. Louis Brown Stockings, converged to form the first US pro league, the

National Association of Professional Baseball Players.

Though a bold experiment by 1875, the fledgling organization had disbanded, with most of its

franchise's reforming as the newly organized National League of Professional Baseball

clubs.

In 1895, Bann Johnson ascended the leadership of baseball's floundering Western League,

and revamped and rebranded it as the American League of Professional Baseball clubs.

In 1903, these two dominant US baseball federations, the National League and the American League,

began matching up their champions to determine an overall winner and a succession of games

dubbed in characteristically ethnocentric American hubris, the World Series.

This tradition is carried on to this day, with the 113th contest currently underway between

the NLs, Los Angeles Dodgers, and the ALs, Houston Astros.

Flashback 150,000 years to an even older and more universal tradition, the human consumption

of shellfish.

Two caves uncovered by Paleoanthropologist, one in South Africa, one in the South of

Spain, show evidence that prehistoric Neanderthals and other human ancestors consumed muscles,

oysters, and prawns, most commonly referred to in the US, as shrimp.

While the Jewish kosher law of the Old Testament outright forbade their consumption,

designating them abominations, shellfish was still eaten across the globe, among indigenous

peoples of the Americas, in Southeast Asia, and in ancient Greece.

...