Baseball in Germany started in 1936, with the first official baseball game being played at the 1936 Olympics. After World War II, baseball was popularized by American soldiers who were stationed in Germany. Today, baseball is a minor sport in Germany, although the country is still home to one of Europe's biggest baseball communities, with around 30,000 active players. The national governing body is the Deutscher Baseball und Softball Verband (German Baseball and Softball Federation), and the highest baseball league is the 1. Baseball Bundesliga. Max Kepler is currently the only German-developed player in Major League Baseball. History Before World War II The first mention of baseball in Germany was found in a 1796 book on sports by German writer Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, where he was writing about a game called schlagbal, a very old German-Austrian game. Although Germans were exposed to bat-and-ball games from an early stage, baseball did not rise in popularity until after World War II. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a lot of European countries received interest from major league players, one of which was Hall of Fame member John McGraw. From 1888 to 1889, A.G. Spalding went on a Major League Baseball world tour where he visited Italy, France and the United Kingdom, but not Germany since Berlin was covered in snow that winter. In 1912-1913, John McGraw and Charlie Comiskey went on another world tour, but again Germany, because of the threat of inclement weather during the tour, was left off the schedule. This likely was a reason why baseball was left more undeveloped than in other European countries like Italy or the Netherlands. During World War I, American soldiers played baseball in Germany but the first official game on German grounds took place in Berlin at the 1936 Olympics. The sport was introduced in a demonstration tournament where the United States was planned to play against other nations, including Japan. The ongoing economic depression caused other nations to cancel their arrangements for the tournament, leaving the Americans to play a split-squad exhibition game in front of the German audience on the last day of the Olympics. On August 12, 1936, the World Amateurs and the U.S. Olympics played at the Olympiastadion in front of possibly up to 125,000 spectators, which would be largest baseball audience to date. The stadium was not designed to accommodate baseball, leaving lights only into