Would you care to explain why you think baseball has a greater intellectual appeal than football or basketball?
Baseball is the most statistics-friendly of sports. Discrete events. It can be summarized in a box score. The box scores of sports with clocks are much less revealing.
Also, George Will writes about baseball.
Baseball requires a batter to recognize pitch, location, ball motion all in the span of about .7 of a sec. Repeat this for 162 games trying to scientifically determine patterns and tendencies of pitchers who are charting your nuances, tendencies, weaknesses and hitches... Now...move on from one portion of baseball to another. Fielding. Then baserunning. Then player movements to maximize your teams potential...
The game is exceedingly hard and nowhere compares to bowling or billiards.
George Will said it best. (paraphrased) "Baseball is like going to Church. Many attend but few understand."
At any given moment, there are dozens of things going on in a baseball game. The expression "the game inside the game" was defined with baseball in mind.
The most beautiful thing in the world growing up as a boy enamored with baseball was when for the 1st time I walked thru the concrete tunnel toward the seats and suddenly like an explosion you see the GREEN grass, the dirt infield, the mound, the white bases, and thousands and thousands of people...all under a sunny blue sky.
Sorry for the poor descriptive analysis.