Miller: Dear 1987, you’re not going to believe what’s happened to baseball
From Sam Miller at ESPN.com on July 26, 2017:
Say you had a time machine. Say you set it to 1987. Say you met a baseball fan from that year named Kelly. What could you tell Kelly about baseball in 2017 that would most strain his or her belief?
Keep in mind, Kelly has seen lots of representations of the future. Kelly expects the future to be different: sentient refrigerators and miracle drugs and time machines and dystopian utopias. Kelly knows computers are a thing in the world, that steroids are a thing in sports, that TVs can have more than 13 channels and that football and basketball are ascendant. And Kelly had seen what had happened in baseball in the previous 30 years: the internationalization of the game, the physical growth of the average player, the replacement of complete games with saves, the professionalization of a league that had fairly recently been played by offseason car salesmen. Kelly expects change, so to shock Kelly, you’d need something that (A) came out of nowhere, (B) reversed something about the sport’s trajectory, (C) carries on that trajectory, but to an extreme endpoint, or (D) reflects some broader cultural change that dramatically reimagines America and, by secondary effect, its pastime.
Read the full article here: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/20163577/dear-1987-not-going-believe-happened-baseball
Originally published: July 27, 2017. Last Updated: July 27, 2017.