The book is a series of essays about baseball and the U.S. Not how baseball shaped the country's culture, especially given that the team owners are so often reluctant to embrace new things. More how the sport's changes reflect the attitudes of a given time.
So Tygiel might have an essay about Bobby Thompson's game-winning home run against the Dodgers in 1951, and how more people than ever were experiencing the game via radio and even the newer medium of television. Then he'll discuss the challenges faced in trying to adapt to a new way of describing a game to fans, and how many of the team owners resisted broadcasting games, as they many resisted airing them over radio, because they believed fans wouldn't come spend money at the ballpark if they could just listen (or watch) at home.
Which is a far cry from the state of things today, where it's all about TV (or streaming) money, and once teams have that guaranteed money locked in, a lot of them don't see any need to, you know, put together a team that would bring fans to the park by being good enough to compete for a championship.
Some of the essays are more interesting to me than others. Chapter 6, "Unreconciled Strivings," was a brief, but informative look at the Negro Leagues and the various challenges they faced. The push to have more of the teams owned by black people rather than white, and how hard it was to get a stadium of their own, rather than being stuck renting say, the Yankees' stadium when they were on road trips. At the same time, the teams were often trying to encourage white fans to come to the games (mostly without success), to get bigger turnouts. That Sunday games were the only ones that tended to draw big crowds, because that was the only day most black Americans had free to go to games. So teams scheduled a lot of double-headers on Sundays, and unofficially encouraged teams to make sure their best pitchers were available for Sunday games. The push-and-pull between wanting baseball to be integrated, but also not wanting to lose these leagues that were uniquely theirs.
In contrast, I didn't find Chapter 3, "Incarnations of Success," useful or persuasive. It details the rise of four players: Charles Comiskey, Connie Mack, John McGraw, and Clark Griffith. Each later became a manager, and still later, owned their own teams. Each of the four during their playing careers joined various movements to get better pay for the players, or break the reserve clause that meant one team held their rights for as long as it wanted, only to start pushing to reduce player salaries once they were on the management side of things. But that wasn't terribly surprising, and I'm not sure it really highlights anything specific about the United States in the first decades of the 20th Century that wasn't true in lots of other places across the globe and at different times.
I'm not sure the book would be of any interest to a non-baseball fan. It probably isn't in-depth enough about broader history to entice someone in that regard, and the writing can be fairly dry. The amount of humor or energy is reliant on the quotes or anecdotes Tygiel pulls from for each essay.
'Baseball did not appeal to Americans, as many have suggested, because it took less time to play than cricket or townball. The architects of the game deliberately adopted an out and inning structure designed to compress play into the time available for games.'
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