LONDON - Baseball might have lost its chance to be the world game back in 1751 when Frederick Louis, heir to the English throne, died after being struck in the head fielding a cricket ball.

The death allowed his son, King George III, to ascend to the throne, where he would sit when the American colonies rebelled.

"Had Frederick Louis lived, he might have introduced baseball to a wider British public," explained Stefan Szymanski, an English economist at Tanaka Business School in London. "He also wrote of playing a baseball-like game indoors, and he might have made baseball the national game in England."

By that logic, a wayward cricket ball changed baseball and American history, clearing the way for soccer to become the world's game.

The intertwined histories of baseball and soccer are explored in the book "National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer," by Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist, an American economist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.

Due in April, the book attempts to explain why soccer became the world's No. 1 game - almost everywhere but the United States.

"You can buy a McDonald's Big Mac on the Champs Elysees, and anything from anywhere in the world on Fifth Avenue, but American sporting culture and the world soccer culture do not mix," Szymanski and Zimbalist wrote.

Why do some games catch on, and others don't?

A sports historian at Amherst College, Allen Guttmann argues in his book, "Games and Empires," that the "political, economic and cultural power of the nation that invents them" determines if games will go worldwide.

"If the British had played baseball in the 1870s, you'd see everybody in Europe, South America and Africa playing baseball now," Guttmann said in an interview. "However, in that period it was soccer Britain was spreading, not baseball."

Despite reaching the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, soccer remains on the fringe of sports in the United States. Like baseball in England, soccer in America lost out to a few historical accidents.

While most American colleges in 1874 were playing a soccer-like game, Harvard stuck to its own version called the "Boston Game." Played with a round ball, it also involved some carrying and throwing.

Unable to find American opponents, Harvard played a two-game series in 1874 with Montreal's McGill University; one with rugby rules, the other under Boston rules.

Less than a year later, Harvard lost a rugby game to Tufts College, which is credited as the first match between American colleges of the game that became known as American football.

Some date American football from 1869 when Rutgers played Princeton, but that was soccer they were playing.

Zimbalist has written widely about soccer and baseball and termed the choice of rugby - and hence, American football - over soccer a "subjective, personal kind of event."

"The Ivy League schools took rugby and transfigured it," he said.

This was, after all, the generation of Teddy Roosevelt and the conquest of the American frontier.

"These were young men who were very anxious to prove their masculinity and, for them, rugby was a rougher, tougher and more virile game than soccer," Guttmann said.

Baseball and soccer have one common root - England.

A game known as "base-ball" was described in a book published in 1744 in London. It eventually reached the east coast of America, and the rest is history.

In 1842, Alexander Cartwright founded the Knickerbocker baseball club in New York and, in 1876, Chicagoan William Hulbert established the National League - the world's first professional league.

Modeled after it, Scotsman William McGregor set up The English Football League 12 years later.

"Soccer is a lot newer than baseball," said Szymanski. "Baseball has been around a lot longer. You have to reverse your thinking. Baseball is the old man and soccer is the young upstart."

Baseball thrived in the United States, partly because soccer failed to gain a foothold.

There were several world tours late in the 19th century to sell baseball, and repeated attempts to set up a professional league in England. But American baseball promoters were more concerned with securing an American monopoly than creating a global game.

"A lot of the motivation in other countries in the early soccer days was actually to beat the English at their game," Szymanski said. "With no Americans out there to play against, it was very hard for baseball to bite."