How were baseball and football at the center of new leisure and mass culture in the late 1800s?

Around this time, more people were able to join middle management at factories. This gave the United States a new leisure class who had disposable income to go to baseball and football games. The modern game of baseball has been around since the time of the Civil War. Teams started to play regularly and employ professional players, though the profession was not as well-paid and respected as it is today. Advertisers used magazines, baseball cards, and billboards at stadiums to promote teams and their products. Many of the first baseball cards came in packs of cigarettes. It was not expensive to go to a baseball game, and the rules were quite lax at the stadium, with some stadiums being so small that extra seating was available on the outfield grass.
While professional football would not become important until the 1920s, college football became important in the late nineteenth century. People enjoyed the constant action of the sport and the element of danger it carried; with the rudimentary equipment of the day, serious injuries and even deaths were not uncommon. The rise of the sport coincided with a slight uptick in the number of people going to college, though many people who could never afford college became some of the sport's most avid supporters. Many of the early college football powers were Ivy League schools in the East who relied on close proximity to each other to make travel easier.