Bring back the good old days?

Question

Natural Grass only, no DH, no Inter-league play, no Dome stadiums, take out the lights at Wrigley Field, remove the Seats behind the left field fense at Fenway Park, Re-Build Ebbets Field and send the Dodgers Home, give more credit to the great ***** League players such as Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, and start every World Series game at 1:00 in the afternoon. Have we lost something over the years or is it just me?

I want to hear from you Blue26

This was more of a philosophical question about where do you draw the line between between history and tradition of the game vs. modernization and money. Do we want the game to be somewhat like it was created to be or keep evolving to follow the money. I will pick a winner soon.

Answer 1

You need to build yourself a time machine & go back to the 30's my friend. Sure we have lost some nice things about baseball, but times change, & baseball is a multi-billion dollar business. It needed to change with the times, maybe not all good changes, but changes that most baseball fans have accepted and have grown accustom to now.

Answer 2

Oh, hey, let's really bring back those Olde Dayes. Not white? Yer out -- permanently. Airplanes? Too newfangled; it's trains for you mollycoddled wimps. Night games? Pfeh; harder to see the ball. Broadcast games over the teevee or radio? That'll hurt ticket sales at the gate! New, white balls? These beat-up mushers from last week will do. Oversold the game? Let 'em sit in foul territory behind ropes, and make sure they give back the balls. And, oh dear, if we settle in during Prohibition there's no beer to be had.

Because one must take the bad with the good.

Artificial turf isn't that big a deal any more. There's only three parks that still use unliving surfaces -- Metrodome, Tropicana, and Rogers, and the Twins are getting a new, grass park come 2010 or so. They all use FieldTurf, which is about as close as fake stuff can come to real grass.

Gibson and Leonard are in the Hall Of Fame. I don't see how much more credit can be heaped upon them, or that it should be. What I'd really like regarding the ***** Leagues would be -- statistics. Real, proofed stats from league-sanctioned games. There's a wee bit on the Hall's website, research provided for the 2006 Special Committee, but it's pretty spare (only the considered players are included) and in PDF format. Honest-to-goodness stats (much like BaseballReference.com provides) would be sweet.

As for the World Series start times, anything earlier than the 8:30 Eastern that Fox typically imposes would be preferred. They start extra-late, they jam in too many ads, and when fans complain that games take too long and end too late, Fox is incapable of (or, more likely, uninterested in) understanding why this is so.

Baseball moves on. The game is still the same -- pitch, hit, run, throw, score, play nine, three outs per. The details around it tend to keep reasonable pace with the rest of the world.

Answer 3

Send the Dodgers home? Yeah that will work real well with the LA Dodgers fans who had the team there well long enough to be their own. I think you could seperate the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the LA Dodgers for the sake of preserving TRUE history to the place that it came from. But to take a franchise away from a city that it's well established in and put them back into a place where once the novelty of the newly reborn Brooklyn Dodgers wears off, they have to compete for marketing with the Mets and Yankees.

Start the world series at 1pm? I DON'T want to be at work and having to miss game 7 when the Orioles have their closer on the mound and are one out away from winning the world series thanks in large put to a crucial go-ahead 3 run homer in the bottom of the 8th. All because the game is playing in the afternoon.

Give more credit to the ***** League players? I don't see where giving Josh Gibson and others can't hurt. I wouldn't mind that all though baseball all ready this season gave a nice show of appreciation for Jackie Robinson.

I don't mind seeing interleague games shortened, though I still like the inner-state and inner-metro rivalries such as Baltimore vs. Washington, Cubs vs. White Sox, Rangers and Astros, Yankees and Mets, etc.

Remove dome stadiums? I think retractable roofs are the way to go for new stadiums in extreme temperature conditions, such as Toronto and Houston. I think baseball though IS an outdoor sport.

I don't think baseball overall though has lost everything, but things change with time, baseball is no different.

Answer 4

Face it, Things change. The players move on, the fans move on, and as the generations change the expectations change. Thats why everything is different in baseball. They take the pressure off of the pitcher with the DH. They have dome stadiums so they can play in bad weather. They dont have the money to build new stadiums and reconstruct them all. They have money but not for new stadiums. And a 1:00 world series is not convenient for many people. If its in the middle of a work day then nobody will be able to see it if they dont work in an office. They are making everything more convenient weather you know it or not.

Answer 5

You go too far. Some of the changes have been good. You have to go with the times. I love baseball and have accepted the changes. In fact, one thing you did not mention was the wild card. That has been great for baseball!

Answer 6

I think it's just you.