Do You Enjoy Baseball as Much as You Used to?

This question is aimed at people who started following major league baseball before the late ’90s, that is, before the Internet became a big deal, before every game of a season was televised, and before the home run boom really got going. Was MLB more enjoyable in the earlier years? If it was, did that result from you being younger, or from changes in MLB and how it’s presented by legacy media and on the Web?

I think if you remain a baseball fan after the transition from adolescence to adulthood, you inevitably realize that many, maybe most of the players in MLB have few exceptional qualities beyond their ability to play baseball. Certainly they are not, in any moral sense, better than the ordinary human being. This produces a more skeptical attitude toward MLB: the raw emotional attachment to teams and players goes away, and so you enjoy the games less than you used to.

For example: I read Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life , and its detailing of how DiMaggio’s very lucrative baseball card and memorabilia signing deals in the ’80s and ’90s were done. The details are not pretty, and I couldn’t come away from that education with anything other than the sense that the card and memorabilia industry was, and presumably still is, filled with shady, hard-driving accountants and business school graduates with very, very little sentimental attachment to baseball. They saw a chance when the industry boomed in the ’80s, got in, and, if they were smart and lucky, got out before the industry tumbled in the ’90s. Once you get that impression, you can’t look at a 1988 Donruss David Wells rookie card the same way you used to.

[I first put this question on my own blog, and you can read the responses here .]