George W. (Alexandria, VA): I love false nostalgia for a fake time in baseball...everything about Baseball in the 80's was an attempt to make it like other sports...multi-purpose stadiums all around, awful "modern" jerseys (Astros, White Sox, etc.) Emphasis on the speed game to make it "faster" . . . bad times. Baseball was trying to be something it wasn't. Look at the attendance...Baseball in the 80's stunk.
Steven Goldman: You mean after the owners got together and decided to collude on salaries, they also colluded on offensive styles as well? You've completely misread history. Few teams emphasized speed to the exclusion of all else, principally the Cardinals, and that was only because that's how Whitey Herzog figured he could make his park work for him. Others had select players who could run and run really well, like Rickey Henderson or Eric Davis, but could also get on base and hit the ball out of the park. In many ways it was a more dynamic game, with all of those styles coming together to make a really varied offense. I would argue it was the apotheosis of all the eras that came before it, the truce between the lively ball and previous era of "inside baseball" and thus the epitome of baseball, a sampling of everything that made the game great... No defending the cookie cutter parks, but those were mostly the offspring of the 1970s and proved to be really transient.
Baseball Prospectus Chat
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