Bow to the feet of Dick Mountain, he of the perpetual blister and fellow jizz user. Baseball "agitprop" continues as the Houston Asterisks became yesterday's news, (bad timing for the hot new book, ) and the new squabble concerned pitchers using a goo/sunscreen/coca-cola/spider-tack jizz concoction on their fingers to have better control and higher spin rate. Of course, MLB was impartial until the media fired shots about baseball being "boring" due to the 3 true outcome trends, no-hitters becoming run-of-the-mill and baseball's collective batting average dropping quicker than a high school girl's panties on prom night. It wasn't uncommon to hear baseball's old coots/greats spewing nonsense about "going the other way" and "choking up" when they had to face the otherworldly velocity and wicked breaking shit day to day that the modern-day players have to face, essentially making their points void and out of context. (Ty Cobb said the same shit about Babe Ruth and on and on and on... )
It's the stale old case of baseball being better "back in the day" when in reality it probably wasn't. The strike zones in the 70's/80's were more horrendous than today with the zone changing arbitrarily from AL to NL, and pitchers getting called strikes a foot off the plate from East to West. were playing daily and barely batting above .220 with little power, and pitchers were also proving their "toughness" by losing games in the later innings when it was obvious to everyone in the ballpark that they were barely throwing above 90 at that point while a bullpen guy that could throw peas sat on his ass and stared at a blonde in the front row. ( Banjo-hitters Tony LaRussa is now hearkened as a "genius" for being able to compute basic math and daring to challenge the norms) These same standard-bearers are also nostalgic for .300 batting averages (a stat that is not as relevant as it used to be) even though Tony Gwynn, he of multiple batting titles, didn't score a seasonal 100 runs after his 27th birthday. Do you smell what I'm dishing here? The key to winning is , not , and being stuck in the Mesozoic Era doesn't necessarily mean unless you beating the shit out of a dinosaur with a bone and dragging your significant other by the hair into a cave.
In the end, organizations are trying to , not look aesthetically pleasing to old farts who should probably take a trip to the ballet if they are looking for dainty and pleasing visual cues that remind them of their younger years-which begs the question: if baseball is a numbers. Didn't we just endure a blazing hot point of discussion about moving the mound back a few months ago? Or banning the shift? Quit tinkering! Leave the goddamn game alone! This game was here long before you and your cultural heroes were enjoying their lives and the fruits of their labor and will be here long after this generation and the next are in the ground rotting dying sport, why has attendance averaged (roughly) 30.000 asses in the seats when it barely reached 15-25 in the '70s and '80s? The "get off my lawn" argument just doesn't hold water and sounds just as ridiculous, pious, and nonsensical as a wrinkled, childish, dunderhead spit-spewing while wearing a red cap that states, "Make Baseball Great Again." These people want the facade without the meat and potatoes even though they claim to want both. They hate the numbers just because they're not the aeternum.
