Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
One of my favorite old movies is “12 Angry Men” (I promise, this will get to our topic at hand, so just bear with me). If you’ve never heard of the movie, it’s a jury of men on a murder case and you don’t need to know more about it for the purposes of this discussion. I bring it up because there is one part where a few of the jurors are lamenting the kids of that era and how they — you know how this one goes — haven’t earned a thing.
Yawn. We’ve heard it all a million times, right?
The movie was made in 1957. Now, yes, I’m fully aware that it’s fictional, but screenwriter Reginald Rose wouldn’t have included it unless it was a familiar thought. That same criticism still lingers today and it surely always has.
For one reason or another, every generation loves to bitch and moan about how the generations after them just don’t understand. They have everything far too easy! They don’t respect their elders! They don’t even know what hard work is! The list of shaming goes on and on.
Sports are no different here. As I’m a baseball writer — I’m 46, so I obviously don’t work as hard as any of the writers in their 60s but definitely work far harder than any of those damn, spoiled kids in their 20s, right? — I’ll stay in my lane here.
It has long driven me crazy that a large swath of former players feel the need to talk about the generations of baseball players that came after them in such a negative light.
The latest? C’mon down, Barry Bonds!
In discussing Shohei Ohtani specifically but more as a vehicle to just complain about how much easier everyone has it these days, Bonds offered up the following on the “All the Smoke” podcast:
“Ohtani is not gonna hit two home runs without seeing one go (by his ear) in my generation. I don’t care what he does. He’s not gonna steal two bases without someone decapitating his kneecap to slow him down. It’s a different game back then.”
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“They should be better than us hitting-wise because they can hit a home run, throw their bat up in the air, run around, get a taco, come back down and have a limo drive them around,” Bonds said. “All these antics that we weren’t allowed to do. If I did anything like that, I’m gonna see a star. I’m gonna see a hospital, but I ain’t gonna see baseball that day.”
We can ignore the obvious hyperbole and get to the actual points.
A player couldn’t steal two bases during Bonds’ career without a team trying to injure him? That’s far funnier than his limo and taco “jokes.” There were certainly more contact plays from the 1980s through 2005 or so, but those were double-play turns at second and collisions at home plate. I’m hard pressed to find an example where a team punished a baserunner for stealing multiple bases by physically assaulting his knee on the bases. There’s no evidence that, say, Rickey Henderson routinely had pitches aimed at his knees on as many occasions as it would have called for, given Bonds’ comments.
As for pitchers throwing at heads, yeah, it used to happen a lot more. It happened a lot more in the eras before Bonds than during Bonds’ era, too. It’s been a gradual decrease as pitchers have thrown harder and harder and people have realized we maybe shouldn’t mess around with a player’s safety over hurt feelings.
The weird thing about Bonds’ comments was that he didn’t discuss how much better pure stuff the pitchers have now, because they inarguably do. They throw much harder than they used to and the breaking stuff moves more — again, while traveling faster — by physical measurement. Even if Bonds’ assertion is that the threat of a pitch in the ear hole makes it harder to hit, shouldn’t the much better raw stuff in 2025 even things out a bit?
Let’s also keep in mind that MLB through the ’90s and early 2000s was playing with baseballs that were very likely juiced (to the gills), producing a power onslaught like nothing we saw before and nothing we’ve seen since. There wasn’t PED testing. The league expanded by four teams in the ’90s, diluting the pool of pitchers much further than previous generations. The result of all this? A veritable explosion. The numbers were outrageous.
And you’re gonna say hitters now have it easier?
Regardless, no need to get further in the weeds, because the specifics are beside my main point.
My main point is this: quit being so insecure about your own era that you feel the urge to talk down about everyone else. It’s been happening forever in all walks of life and it’s so dumb. In MLB, we’ve heard so many times from grumps like Goose Gossage about how much more baseball sucks now. I found a quote from four-time All-Star Andy Pafko, in “Banks to Sandberg to Grace” by Carrie Muskat, where someone asked him if he wished he was still playing baseball. His answer?
“Yes and no. Yes for the salary. But no, because when I played it was real baseball.”
Ooooh. You hear that, all? They used to play real baseball, but they didn’t in…2002, apparently, because that’s when the book was published. That’s also the era in which Bonds played.
How much would Bonds have scoffed at that when he was playing? Do you really want to be that guy now, Barry?
You know who you should strive to be these days? CC Sabathia does nothing but speak in positive fashion about today’s game. I interviewed him two years ago and he was gushing about how amazing Ohtani is. In general, he had nothing to say to detract from the current players. It was so much more fun to hear than someone sitting there and claiming everyone now has it easy.
To the former players out there who strongly disagree with me and think their era was the absolute best and every era that came later was somehow worse and easier to play: Feel free to continue deluding yourselves. You could always just keep it to yourself. If you feel it’s very important to speak out, just know that it’s a very unbecoming look to talk down on those who follow. It sounds incredibly insecure, too. If that’s who you want to be, you do you. I guess.
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