Bill Simmons waxes nostalgic for the days when being a sports fan sucked. Simmons is perhaps more bitter than I’d be, but he has a point. We lose our individual innocence and wonderment as we age, and the world discovers new ways to be cynical; the combination makes us think the past was a Golden Age. We can always identify ways it really was, but we’re selective (Gustave Flaubert: “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.” Bill James (paraphrased): “When people tell me they’d like to have lived in the 18th century, I ask them whether they’d have enjoyed having their teeth pulled without anasthesia.”). In the 1930s, fans said, “I remember before all this home run craziness, when scoring a run was a team effort and really meant something.” They didn’t say, “I remember when I was a kid and the White Sox threw the World Series.”
James had a better point in the 80s when he said he wished somebody had told him in the sixties and early seventies to enjoy all the great power pitchers, that they wouldn’t always be around. He was writing then about the generation of great leadoff men headed by Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines, and it says something about what followed that generation that both men lasted into the 21st century. Every generation does have its glories that we will not see the like of again. Enjoy Pedro and Randy Johnson; admire Barry Bonds; tip your hat to Shaq. They may not pass this way any time soon.