Can I publish Pages in Root Directory and Blog Posts in Another?

Folks:

I have an issue that I originally thought would be quite simple to deal with, but is quickly becoming a headache.

I’m using WordPress as the CMS for a new site. I would like my WordPress site and ‘Pages’ to load in the root directory while the Blog index and subsequent ‘Posts’ reside in another.

To clarify…

Desired URL structure:
homepage – domain.com
products – domain.com/products
??? products > hats – domain.com/products/hats
??? products > shirts – domain.com/products/shirts
blog – domain.com/blog
??? blog > first post – domain.com/blog/first-post

Current URL structure:
homepage – domain.com
products – domain.com/products
??? products > hats – domain.com/products/hats
??? products > shirts – domain.com/products/shirts
blog – domain.com
??? blog > first post – domain.com/first-post

Within the admin settings, I’ve already set my WordPress address to domain.com/blog and my Website address to domain.com, but this obviously has no effect on the permalinks/URL structure of the ‘Pages’ and ‘Posts’.

My wishful thinking was that the ‘pages of the site’ would publish to domain.com/postname and the ‘wordpress blog posts’ would publish to domain.com/blog/postname. This is still the goal.

I have to believe that there is some type of hardcoding hack or override I can implement (possibly in .hataccess file?) that can accomplish this.

Any help or insight is greatly appreciated.

Best,
-jg