Originally Posted by Old_Moparz
Lost most interest in the game after one of the player strikes when they were crying for more money & had a shortened season. Of course the greed by the owners is a huge turn off as well. I'd watch it on TV when I felt like it, but I never paid for a sports channel to get games on TV. When the YES network had a contract dispute with my satellite company & I lost the channel entirely, I stopped watching. I have only been to four games in the last 30 years & three of them were free when I was given a ticket. The one I paid for was actually the last year that the old Yankee Stadium was still being used & the new one was being built next to it. I took my wife & son so they could at least see the place before it was gone.

When rules or ways the game is played change it's always hard to get used to it. I didn't think the DH was a good idea but got used to it. I used to like seeing pitchers get 20+ wins regularly but now it's rare that they get 20 starts. I'd get used to the new rules even if I don't like them. You can adapt, it's part of life. The things I can't adapt to are shelling out $250 a month for TV, $20 hot dogs, $30 beers, $12 candy bars, & all after paying the equivalent of the GDP of a small country for tickets to crappy seats with some drunken loudmouth standing in front of me ready to jump on to the field to have a fist fight with the umpire.

I still love baseball, always did. I even went & tired out for a minor league team in 1995 & met the manager who played for the the Detroit Tigers when I was a kid, Ron LeFlore. cool (I didn't make the team by the way...LOL)
Ron LeFlore! That's a great story from the past! I understand everything you wrote about! It was great when pitchers would pitch complete games and pitch well over 200 innings a season. Real workhorses and bulldogs. Now so many have a pre-planned bull pen schedule for the 7th, 8th and 9th. Remember Jack Morris? Quite the work horse. Although not in the same category, I actually liked Dan Petry better.

Greed has certainly effected the game negatively. Ads are everywhere during the game and it's annoying. They are even showing in-game commercials! I'm hanging on because the game I have loved all my life is the last professional sport I watch. I haven't gone to a Spring Training game in over a decade, and I'm in Florida and several train only an hour away. Joker Marchant stadium is only about two hours away.

P.S. As much as I hate to admit it, I believe Dave Windfield had the strongest arm in Right Field I ever saw. Geez, I remember someone on the Tigers hitting a ball to deep right and it hit the base of the wall and died there. Winfield picked it up and threw a cannon from the wall to Home on the fly and nailed the runner that had been on First. I still remember it all these years later and I was just a little kid. That's when both were in the AL East and rivals of course.

Facts are stubborn things.