Man, the game of baseball just isn’t the same as it used to be.
No, I’m not talking about the tragic inclusion of sabermetrics, the steroid era, the addition of the Wild Card(s), team expansion, the DH, Murderer’s Row, or even Abner Doubleday. No you have to go back much further than that.
I’m talking about the way it used to be played:
https://twitter.com/CBSSportsMLB/status/681543799970131969
This particularly interesting scroll (parchment?) was discovered back in 1999, dates to about 1301 in present-day Belgium, and depicts what seems to be an early version of baseball! Well, at least, it seems to be – one guy is throwing some sort of ball at another guy who looks like he’s trying to hit it with some sort of bat.
I wonder what those old timers would think of all these “new age” terms and analytics like “bases,” “hits” and “runs.”
It’s just not the same game anymore.