The paper frames the history of baseball's meaning as the USA's ‘national pastime’ in terms of the prevalent historiographic paradigm of ‘American exceptionalism.’ It introduces a theoretical framework, in which sport as popular culture can be understood as a cultural practice that hovers between the agendas of various interest groups in a struggle over ideological power and resources. This helps understand the meaning-making process of sports, which represent pastimes and profit-oriented industries at the same time. The paper reviews the history of American exceptionalism as articulated through baseball by defining three phases. Phase one (before 1990) signifies an era in which baseball was interpreted as uniquely and exclusively American by large parts of the U.S. sports scene. Assimilation and exclusion were the main characteristics that shaped those instants in which American baseball came in contact with foreign individuals. During phase two (1990–2000), a first wave of interference from the baseball cultures of Asia, especially Japan, started to transform American baseball. While this was first met by hostility and xenophobia in parts of the sports scene, phase three (after 2000) shows signs of a growing intercultural awareness articulated through baseball in America. This paper recapitulates the central episodes of these three phases, and specifically examines the changing perspective of the American sports media's representations and interpretations over time. As a result, the process of baseball's internationalization can be understood as a prime example of instances in which ‘low-brow’ cultural practices are faced with trends of globalization in the last years.