Question: Is it true or false that by the late 19th century baseball was recognized as the national sport of the United states?
About the article "Baseball", section "Abstract".

Candidate passages:
The Doubleday myth refers to the belief that the sport of baseball was invented in 1839 by future American Civil War general Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York.
Abner Graves presented a claim that Doubleday invented baseball to the Mills Commission, a group formed in 1905 that sought to prove whether the sport originated in the United States or was a variation of rounders, a game played in Britain.
Graves' evidence was accepted by the Commission, and in 1908 it named Doubleday as the creator of baseball.
The claim received criticism soon afterwards, and most modern baseball historians consider it to be false.
The myth nevertheless led to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's being located in Cooperstown. 
Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of nine players who take turns batting and fielding.
The offense attempts to score runs by hitting a ball thrown by the pitcher with a bat and moving counter-clockwise around a series of four bases: first, second, third and home plate.
A run is scored when the runner advances around the bases and returns to home plate.
Players on the batting team take turns hitting against the pitcher of the fielding team, which tries to prevent runs by getting hitters out in any of several ways.
A player on the batting team can stop at any of the bases and later advance on a teammate's hit or other means.
The teams switch between batting and fielding whenever the fielding team records three outs.
One turn at bat for both teams, beginning with the visiting team, constitutes an inning, and nine innings a game.
The team with the greater number of runs at the end of the game wins.
Evolving from older bat-and-ball games, an early form of baseball was being played in England by the mid-18th century.
This game was brought by immigrants to North America, where the modern version developed.
By the late 19th century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States.
Baseball is now popular in North America and parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, East Asia and Europe.
In the United States and Canada, professional Major League Baseball (MLB) teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL), each with three divisions: East, West, and Central.
The major league champion is determined by playoffs that culminate in the World Series.
The top level of play is similarly split in Japan between the Central League and Pacific Leagues and in Cuba between the West League and East League.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, a dispute arose about the origins of baseball and whether it had been invented in the United States or developed as a variation of the British game of rounders.
The theory that the sport was created in the U.S. was backed by Chicago Cubs president Albert Spalding and National League president Abraham G. Mills.
In 1889, Mills gave a speech declaring that baseball was American, which he said was determined through "patriotism and research"; a crowd of about 300 people responding by chanting "No rounders!"
The rounders theory was supported by prominent sportswriter Henry Chadwick, a native of Britain who noted common factors between rounders and baseball in a 1903 article.
In 1905, Spalding called for an investigation into how the sport was invented.
Chadwick supported the idea, and later in the year a commission was formed.
Spalding instructed the commission to decide between the American game of "Old Cat" and rounders as baseball's predecessor.
Seven men served on the commission, including Mills.
Spalding chose the committee's members, picking men who supported his theory and excluding supporters of the rounders claim, such as Chadwick. 
The following is a list of United States Major League Baseball teams that played in the National League during the 19th century. 
Considered by both North American and Latin American players to be "the gringo's game" in the early 20th century, the sport of baseball was adopted by the Dominican Republic.
These players avoided the ethnocentrism and exclusion of the major leagues of the United States, and developed their own teams.
This brief era of Dominican baseball history (1950-1954) is known as "beisbol romantic" or the Era of Romantic Baseball.
During the Romantic era, national play was revived and free of the influence of individuals outside of the country.
Fandom of these teams skyrocketed and the sport of baseball became the national pastime of the Dominican Republic.
From a cultural standpoint, baseball in the Dominican Republic was, despite its American origins, a local phenomenon.