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The way baseball was created was rather akin to the way dungeons and dragons or the perfect American novel or the best tasting cheesecake are made...we tried a bunch of different configurations and the ones that were the least annoying stuck. :)
The great history channel series "Ken Burns' Baseball" commented at length about how the distances seem to have been picked by God..."a choice from heaven..." they called the 90 foot distance between the bags, saying "if the bases were 91 feet apart, the league might hit .200 in a good year...think of all the SB lost, all the infield singles gone, all the extra outs on ground balls to shallow RF and LF..  If they were 89 feet apart, fielders would be defenseless...most grounders left of second base if hit slowly would be singles!"
The reason the game works is because, for the first 15 years or so (from the late 1840s to the early 1860s) we played it in dozens of different ways and the men who developed a passion for it carefully recorded the outcomes and decided which ones they liked.  More thought, IMHO, was put into inventing baseball than any other organized team sport.