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COOPERSTOWN, NY – "The best part of baseball today is its yesterday," said Lawrence Ritter, author of one of the most beautiful and famous books in the game , "The Glory of Their Times",
. We hear a lot these days, from Major League Baseball offices, about how baseball needs to change, adapt, evolve so that problems affecting presence and attention can be solved.
they say. Not enough hits. Too much lag. Games that extend into eternity and annoy people, pushing them to the high-intensity pop of the NBA and the NFL.
But baseball is different, right? It's the national hobby, a secular religion. It is about tradition and a shared history and past. Change it and you change us.
This weekend brings the latest crop of inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame – the ultimate deposit of yesterday's game – Vladimir Guerrero, Chipper Jones, Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Jim Thome and Trevor Hoffman. Modern players who now belong to the ages.
Baseball is at a crossroads these days. Revenues are up, but attendance is down. People are worried. The game is struggling to clarify its identity – balancing tradition and marketability so that people continue to come attracted by what is increasingly called "the product on the ground".
It's also very American – the tension between what was (and what was a bit) and what is really.
Like the country that surrounds it, baseball often draws on a mythical past that, like all myths, has enough facts anchored in its history to last. The game and the nation have been turned upside down by the era of information, its distractions and the dwindling of its attention. Both are upset by the complexities of an increasingly demanding and disenchanted riding.
But our yesterday, real and imaginary, are an attractive mermaid, as baseball fans who make the summer pilgrimage to Cooperstown know or realize quickly. the place – Victorian architecture, green spaces, ubiquitous noisy and constant reminders of his hand-spun agricultural heritage – seems designed to take you back in time to a baseball past, and a past American, this kind of existence
Even the choice of Cooperstown was a complex transaction between the truth and the myth of helping an agricultural community make the transition to a tourist economy.
When I was a kid, all the signs indicated "Birthplace of Baseball," an ode to Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, who invented the game someday in 1839.
Unless, of course, it does not matter. did not do it. Like a lot of good things, baseball came out not of a single event, but of a troubled soup of predecessors – things like 'city ball', 'old cat' and maybe even the English rounders game. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cooperstown's rise was motivated by the desire to prove that baseball was a purely American game, as it was by historical accuracy. The title of the official magazine of the Hall summarizes well: "Memories and Dreams."
The attraction of the past is powerful when you cross the Hall of Fame and its museum: it engulfs you, beckons you, it speaks of missing men long ago, ways of living long forgotten, sometimes that it would be easy to call simpler (although black and latino athletes may disagree with this conclusion)
Yet while the Hall's romance begins to transport you, if you take a colder look, something emerges from the mist. relics on display: Behind the comfort One discovers a river of change and progress constantly on the move.
There is the baseball cap worn by Bob Montgomery, the Boston Red Sox catcher, on September 9, 1979, the day he became the last great Bat Ligger without a helmet. I remember, child, having had pbadionate debates with friends about whether players should be forced to wear helmets.
Ron Blomberg, of the New York Yankees, used the Bat on April 6, 1973 designated hitter in the history of baseball. The DH debate rages to this day
Nearby, there is the protective flap of the throat invented by the Dodgers catcher Steve Yeager who spread baseball to protect hunters' necks against fastballs and broken bats. been a game of innovation, experimentation and change, "tells us an exhibition on the early history of the game." While the game keeps a foot in the past, always concerned about his darling story, it is also moving forward in the future by changing the rules, adopting new tactics and testing new equipment. "
And there are, of course, The Jackie Robinsons, Larry Dobys, Roberto Clementes and their major league counterparts whose arrivals were, at the time, considered by critics as tectonic changes that baseball could can not stand.
Sabermetry, the free agency, calls reviewed, intentional walking without launching, even the dawn of gloves 150 years ago: each was a radical change that helped to make of the game what it is today. And just ask the current players Don Ngoepe from South Africa or Dovydas Neverauskas of Lithuania, the first MLB players from their countries, if baseball is simply about tradition.
There are continuous arguments, even among the most ardent of the fans it changes the game. I have spent a number of them crossing the Hall this week
In front of the gallery. exhibition Henry Aaron, two men led a lively debate on whether the DH should be deployed in the National League. One floor down, in a room dedicated to the history of Latino players, a similar conversation has unfolded about the changes. And near an exhibition of 19th century catcher mittens, a group of boys talked about the virtues and detriments of the plate blocking rules.
Felt like the way baseball players and executives talk about all this.
with a counterweight to Lawrence Ritter. It's one of the best throwers of the game, who has been denied the right to play in the major leagues for much of his career due to the color of his skin. Not for him the look of a romanticized past that reframed progress as a tradition.
"Do not look back," Satchel Paige said. "Something could win you."
He was extreme, but he had a point. The truth is that there is room in baseball for the three sometimes competing stories – the past, the imagined past, and the very real present.
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