(I originally posted this on SHWI in 2009. Strictly speaking the POD is pre-1900, but most of the interesting effects are post-1900.)
I saw a good movie recently on the subject of sports hooliganism, with Charlie Hunnam, Elijah Wood and Carlos Estevez, and it's got an interesting WI spinning in my head. The film is called Clark Street Hooligans, and centers on Hunnam's character, a well-bred young Englishman who after being wrongly expelled from Oxford travels to Chicago to visit his sister and her husband (Estevez). He meets his brother-in-law's brother, played by Elijah Wood, who is the leader of a Chicago Cubs "firm," which as we all know is a violent gang that loves nothing more than to get into brawls with other baseball teams' firms, in this case mainly the South Side firm supporting the White Sox.
After the Hunnam character breaks his habit of calling baseball "rounders," he finds himself engaging in the first fights of his well-mannered life alongside his new friends in the Clark Street Elite (CSE). Not wanting to spoil anything I'll stop the plot description here, and get to the WI: While Europe and the UK have seen a little socc...er, football... -related disorder once in a great while, sport hooliganism has never been a problem on that side of the pond the way it's been for over a century in the US. We see it a little from fans of (American) football and basketball too, sometimes hockey in the northern U.S. and Canada, but no other sport in any other country rivals American baseball for fan violence.
What if it were the other way around? What if football teams in the UK and Europe had gangs of hooligans fighting each other? What if this weren't the case in the US? The timing of the World Series, ending around the same time as presidential elections has certainly tipped the scales in a few close elections going all the way back to Grover Cleveland's failed bid for a second non-consecutive term, up to Dan Quayle's victory over President Gore in 2004. How might elections have gone without baseball firm violence making incumbents look bad (Gore), or causing other complications (the strangeness of the 1892 election)?
On a completely off-topic note, Elijah Wood is also very good on the BBC series Heirs of Chaos, playing a Triumph riding rural English criminal. He completely disappears into his role as a Brit IMO, looking nothing like the American baseball hooligan he plays in Clark Street.