By Mark Halpern
In today’s baseball game, many teams rely on more players who can hit the long ball than just getting on base and moving runners around to score. The game of baseball has changed so much over the last 100 years.
Teams, when baseball started, didn’t have teams filled with power hitters who could hit 30-40 home runs in a season. Teams relied on singles and doubles and pitching to win games. Homeruns were a rare thing in the beginning. Babe Ruth was the one exception to that rule. He hit more home runs in a season than some team’s entire roster. Small ball was the way baseball was played. Base hits and stolen bases were how the game went. Yes, teams could afford to pay a little more to have a team, but no player was getting $20 million a season to play. Teams weren’t paying their players to hit home runs; they were paying for runs scored.
When baseball became integrated in 1947, the game began to evolve to a game of mixed small ball and players who could hit for power like Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson and Hank Greenberg, and Lou Gehrig. In the 1950’s Mantle, Mays, Matthews, and Aaron, to name a few. Hitting just for singles and doubles had diminished somewhat, and the age of the homerun became vital. However, the need for a small ball was still there. Small teams that couldn’t compete with large ball markets strived by playing small ball but, not for long.
Baseball between the 1960s and 1990s graduated to players who hit for power. Now is the home run a bad thing? Hell, no, it’s not. I love watching a ball go 448 feet in the air and score 3-4 runs in an instant. It’s exciting but, if you have three home runs in a game and another team has 14 hits and moves runners around and score more, you win. The successes of the Athletics, Reds, Mets, Yankees, and Pirates, to name a few, relied on both styles to win the World series.
Let’s fast forward to today. Most teams have players that have 4-5 players who are capable of hitting 25 plus home runs a season. The styles of the small ball don’t exist much anymore. Name me a team that has players all hitting at .275 and above. As we saw in this year’s all-star game (besides Vlad Jr’s Blast), the American League won by minor base hits. That style of the game needs to exist more than it does. Again, I enjoy watching Homeruns fly, but I like seeing hit after hit and seeing stolen bases and runs scored on singles and doubles. The game can’t evolve more than it has now, but we shall see what will happen in the next 10-20 years, and that is how the old man sees it.
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