@wissox
Yours is clearly a popular suggestion.
Alas, I am old fashioned about baseball. Baseball is the last connection we have to the republic era of America. Even basketball was born in the John Dewey cultural re-engineering era of Globalization 1.0. Baseball is the only bench mark America has left to use to compare what we are with what we were.
Also, I am getting particularly cranky about change generally, because it is so obvious that our country is being calculatedly convulsed with the very same means used in the Middle East, and Europe and Latin America. They just have not ratcheted the juice up to where DHS gets to bring its new 2000 light tanks out to start restoring order. But you can see the writing on the wall. Antifa on the left and Neo Nazis on the right are our versions of ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc. They are fully subsidized by the Deep State and at any moment can be switched on to terrorist organizations that can be used to rationalize the DHS tank corp and nanobot swarms and the 5G wireless shizzle that can reputedly kill off the bacteria in our gut biomes and weaken us all to helplessness with a properly distributed series of antennas parked in street lamps.
Oh, but there I go again being jaybate 1.0. :-)
We're just talking about baseball, Ray.
Every rule change, except for those wiping out exclusion based on prejudices, that has ever been done to baseball has made it worse.
Look at the oldest footage you can find of baseball. It was a better game than it is now, except for allowing all categories of persons to play, if they've got the talent. It looked better in the old days. And the farther back you go, the better the uniforms looked. Wool should still be used. The old cleats actually look like baseball shoes instead of soccer shoes.The older gloves actually look like gloves instead of artificial limb augmentations. The baseball caps were perfect at the beginning. The old socks were better.
I'm not harkening back to my time. My youth was the beginning of the ruination of baseball. i'm talking about 1900-1910. That is no more my time than the man in the moon's. But that was always the best baseball played, at the best scale of crowds for the game, in the neatest stadiums. Fields were never meant to be perfect. I hate perfect fields. Baseball fields are supposed to look like fields beside factories surrounded by real bleachers. They aren't supposed to look like golf greens set inside "multi-use infrastructure." And Dugouts are not supposed to look like Mies Van Der Rohe designed them.
And I hate perfect seats. Baseball isn't even supposed to have seats. Its supposed to have bleachers and grand stands. I hate plastic, ergonomically correct seats.
I don't care what they do to basketball and football arenas and seats. All I care about is the game of basketball and I wish football would be banned. But Baseball? This is the last shred of culture America has left. Nothing else remains. Its all gone. All of it. Or what remains isn't worth noticing. Its so repugnant to look at and recall that you don't. Well, wait a minute. I drive by some old barns that still orient me. But if truth be known most of them don't go back farther than the 1920s, even the dilapidated ones.
I got to flea markets to be near drive ins. I hate flea markets. If the drive in screen has been removed, I wouldn't go near a drive in flea market. But if the screen is still up? I will drive up to an hour to just to see it. Seeing it at least is a bench mark between 1960 and now.
Whats the only remotely defensible reason for KU football? The lower facade of Memorial Stadium. That's all. Nothing else about KU football should be permitted to continue. But the lower facade of the Memorial Stadium is a bench mark between the 1920s and now.
They've disfigured all of the best football stadia in our country completely. the Big House in Ann Arbor? God how I love going to a game there. Best football stadium I have ever attended by a mile. But they completely destroyed its appearance with updating and with classroom structures affixed to it. Tragic.
The Rose Bowl still feels kind of good, especially at the flea market.
But how many times can a person with a brain go see a football game played by a team that hasn't been cool since Tommy Prothro and Gary Beban.
I've tried the LA Coliseum and I would frankly rather be sent to Gitmo. It was shit from the moment it was built and they've made it worse.
Please god, don't put a time clock on baseball. Baseball was adapted from a British game back when time was not of the essence in America, and had not been in England either.
If I were like you and watched a lot of baseball, I would want a clock.
But I only go to one game every year, or two, and really don't watch much on TV.
I go to a baseball game like a kind of pilgrammage into the American legacy.
I go to sit there and have hotdogs and sip as much beer as I still can without guzzling it. I go to recall my dad. I go to hear the crack of the ball on a wood bat. I go to hear the vendors. I dearly wish they would rip out all of the electronics and digitalia from modern parks and just have guys up hanging big black cards with white numbers out in the outfield to tell us what inning and score we are at after the fifth beer.
I have already committed to buy a boater for the first time in my life and I am going to wear it to the next baseball game I go to next year.
I also like to wear a Fedora to night games. I don't wear my Fedora anywhere else. Just to the baseball park.
But now I am ready for a Boater.
Rock Chalk!!
P.S.: And I never wear anything synthetic to a baseball game. It has to be cotton, or wool, or maybe hemp. Gotta be leather shoes, or Chucks. I would give a lot of money for a pair of Chucks with designer soles made from real rubber from a Michelin rubber plantation. Real rubber is soooooooo0 much better than vinyl, or petro rubber.
