Why does the Official Scrabble Dictionary have an eight-letter limit?

There are plenty of words that contain nine or more letters that could be played in Scrabble. For example, if the word BASKET is on the board, and add the word BALL, then I just made BASKETBALL. It's a 10-letter word, so, according to the dictionary, it's not permitted.

But why in the world should we exclude a perfectly good word like BASKETBALL, simply because it's not in the Scrabble Dictionary?
 
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