Thorn: Baseball, that lively corpse
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on November 24, 2014:
Last month, Bryan Curtis of ESPN’s Grantland came up to Catskill to chat with me about baseball’s annual burial rites. His fine story, “The Dead Ball Century,” may be read here: http://goo.gl/a1RyNp. A couple of days ago I gathered with my neighbors at the Beattie-Powers Place to deliver my annual Hot Stove League talk and to gab afterwards with my baseball-loving friends. My talk reprised a good bit of my conversation with Bryan and to some degree expanded upon it. Warmed over, you might pronounce this blogpost but, I hope, sturdy like a casserole brought to a covered-dish supper.
There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying. Commentators bemoaned the sluggish play by roving mercenaries who had no loyalty to the teams or their fans; the players’ rampant abuse of controlled substances and the all-too common consort with criminals; the inept and fractious ownership. But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.
And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball’s profitability by “running the game like a business”: they looked for ways to clamp down on salaries, reorganize the leagues to favor the big-market cities, and make real-estate fortunes from their ballparks.
And then came the boom years, capped by home-run heroics on a scale that once seemed unimaginable.
If I haven’t made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of a hundred years ago and more. Yes, we’ve seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling—baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/11/24/that-lively-corpse/
Originally published: November 24, 2014. Last Updated: November 24, 2014.