The Tenth Inning

Around '97, I started noticing that the game was being dumbed down. It was about power, how hard could you throw, how hard you could hit the ball. If you missed the ball, no big deal, swing hard again. To me, it got to such an extreme that a team like the Oakland A's, you would watch them, they'd look like a football team. Broad shoulders, huge biceps, struck out a lot, walked a lot, hit a lot of home runs. They didn't even have signs for hits and runs or stolen bases. They had basically gone to the lowest common denominator in the game, which was appealing to the average fan, which is power, but to me, it was a very different game. I didn't necessarily think it was a better game. (speaking in a foreign language) I think the home run is the name of the game. You see guys that can hit the home runs, they gonna really like them. You don't see too many guys that's small like me that can play the position. I make the spectacular plays, I think a lot of people just come to the ballpark to see the home runs. Ya know, I can't really push myself to be a power hitter. I know the things I needed to do to stay in this game. I needed to bomb the ball, hit the run, put the ball on the ground and play my little game. I mean there is no way that I can just become a power hitter for one day to another. And to get power you needed size so you started seeing the bodies change as well. I remember a shortstop who came in, the Yankees brought him in, Kevin Elster. He was a veteran player, kinda bouncing around, hanging on at the time. The Yankees flat out told him you can't play with that body. It's basically telling him he was too small to play what the game was at the time, which is a real power game. And the home runs began to fly, and there were a couple of years when it was totally out of control in the late 90s. It's sorta depressing, it's like car crashing in movies. It degrades the whole operation. I love home runs, and I love the dramatic home run, and I liked it as much as anyone else. I love the gigantic, towering Barry Bonds' home run, all those things, I love that stuff. But if it happens over and over again as it did in this era, something's been lost. It became more like boxing than baseball in terms of just trying to bludgeon the other team and outscore the other team. It was also entertaining, I mean, let's face it. Guys were hitting balls to places they never thought balls would be hit before. I remember thinking in the late 90s, "Man, everybody now can hit runs to the opposite field." Now you had middle infielders hitting the ball out the other way. There were a lot of things going on in the game, but it all was pointing in the direction of power. The home run fetish had just become lunacy. One of the things about baseball that's most wonderful is that it has nine innings, none players, and it's played best when there are nine runs a game. It's just like the 90 feet to first base. Why is it perfect? We don't know, it just is. Why is nine runs a game perfect, it just is. Having these guys hit a lot of home runs generated interest and helped to get viewers. People looked around, and plus you're gonna get paid more money if you hit a lot of home runs. As the economists would say, the economic incentives were there. My feeling about baseball all the time is that guys are not out there to break records or set records. You're our there as a team to win the championship. That's the objective of the game. Ya know, this isn't track and field. So it's not like I'm trying to run the 400 faster than anybody else. Yeah, it's a thrill to see somebody hit a home run, and during the big offensive age when people were hitting these mammoth home runs, yeah, that was something to see. It was a spectacle, but I really think in some ways it perverted the game. It had people coming out for the wrong reasons, and they had people focused on the game for the wrong reasons. If you look at the 90s, and you say, "Well, what was going on in society?" Well, the dot com bubble was happening, young people were getting millions every single day. It seemed like somebody else was worth 150 million on paper. So everybody seemed to be making big money, and then you had Enron and these companies doing so well, and these CEOs just bringing in all sorts of wealth and having these huge houses. I mean, there're helicopters shots of expanding mansions before your eyes. Well, guess what, none of that was real. The money on paper wasn't real, the money that the Enron executives said they were making wasn't real. It's artificial inflation, it's artificially pumping up your numbers, and it was all about being more than what you really are. That sort of surreality was just a part of baseball as it was a part of society.