The Gameplan
Let's start by giving you an idea of what this whole project is about.
The Gameplan
Nostalgia is a powerful entity, but a surprisingly complicated one to fully parse out.
Truth is, I doubt we’d be here right now if it wasn’t for Covid shutting down the world in early 2020.
All the major sports were put on ice, effectively forcing the networks to open their vaults and fill the airwaves with classic games and a barrage of documentaries about legendary players and iconic moments. Hardly catastrophic considering all the bigger problems afflicting the world, but I’ll admit I was less than thrilled by this programming development.
I’ve never been much of an ESPN Classic guy. The whole idea seems to go against the core tenet of what makes sports so great and unique compared to other forms of entertainment.
It boils down to this. No matter what the betting line might be or how confident the pundits appear, no one truly knows what will happen in any given game. There’s no script. And the possibility that a contest could play out in a million different ways, regardless of how unlikely or ridiculous a potential outcome might be, is what truly holds the audience’s attention.
But if you already know how it ends, that goes out the window. What’s the fun in that? And if that was the case, then why was I surprised to find myself hooked on pandemic sports viewing?
The stories deserve all the credit.
I’ve been in love with stories my whole life. Doesn’t matter what kind. Gritty realism, hard-boiled crime, sci-fi/fantasy, historical drama, goofy comedy— give me some compelling characters and a conflict to throw them all together, and I’ll roll with it. You can find good stories in any corner of the world, and sports are no exception.
The behind-the-scenes-intrigue of Michael Jordan and the Bulls in The Last Dance is no less captivating than the machinations of any historical dynasty. The dysfunction of the 86 Mets in Once Upon a Time in Queens is just as fascinating as the biographies of other immensely gifted and troubled young artists.
Surprisingly, even the old game footage held my attention, despite its lack of helpful narration or convenient cuts for pacing purposes. My encyclopedic baseball knowledge and ability to retain random otherwise unimportant facts finally paid off. Instead of dispelling the tension, the ability to place these moments in context to the individuals’ personal storylines or teams’ greater history provided highlight reel accomplishments with even more profound significance.
Watching Yordano Ventura take the mound and dominate the San Francisco Giants in Game 6 of the 2014 World Series is obviously bittersweet, knowing his life will be tragically cut short in a car accident less than three years later. It’s hard not to wonder what he would have accomplished had he lived, and yet there’s a certain beauty and satisfaction in watching him absolutely spin it on the world’s biggest stage.
Conversely, I was reminded of the euphoria I felt watching Mark McGwire break the single season HR record in 1998. The emotion of his home plate celebration with his son and Sammy Sosa (his rival in the HR chase) after hitting home run 62 is still incredibly powerful to witness over twenty years later, but it’s difficult not to be affected by hindsight as well. A dark cloud hangs over the scene now, knowing the fallout of the steroid era will eventually taint it all.
Nor was it just the stories of the players on the field that sucked me in. It was way more personal than that. I realized my own experiences were intertwined with them.
Whether it was watching the Royals win the World Series when I was six, immaturely laughing with my friends over player names like Dickie Thon, pretending to be Rickey Henderson while playing hot box in between little league games, or eventually taking my own sons to their first games, it became abundantly clear how large of a role baseball has played in my own life.
This got me thinking, and brings me to my main motivation in creating Powder Blue Nostalgia.
To be perfectly frank, I have a lot of issues with the current iteration of baseball. I’m not alone on this, but let me be clear, I’m not a hater. I still follow the game closely and going to the ballpark remains one of my favorite recreational activities, despite the many issues plaguing today’s product, like its overreliance on the three true outcomes approach, pacing problems, and economic inequalities, to name a few. In fact, baseball still ranks far and away as my favorite sport.
Why?
Why does a moderately successful forty-something year old man with a wife and three kids, a career, and a fair amount of other interests and pressing responsibilities still care so much about a kids’ game played by millionaires who probably would have picked on him in high school? A game that has only gotten slower and duller over the years, and is generally considered archaic and irrelevant by the majority of his children’s generation?
The answer I always come back to is the game of my youth. I was fully invested back then, and the game made quite the impression.
Baseball has a lot of golden eras, both formal and informal. The eras of Ruth and Gehrig, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Big Red Machine, and others are universally acknowledged as high points in the game’s history, but I suspect that most baseball fans have their own personal prime when the game reigned supreme.
Most of these golden eras don’t fit easily onto a calendar or under a generic label, and my own is no different. The starting point was easy. I went to my first baseball game at Kauffman Stadium (then Royals Stadium) in 1985, and watched the Royals go on to win their first World Series later that year, hooking me as a fan for the rest of my life, for better or worse. So that is where we will start.
The end point was a little trickier. My initial thought was to end in 1995. This was the year after the Strike, and the Braves (who will feature prominently in this blog due to their contract with TBS) finally won the World Series with their dominant pitching staff. I figured this would be a nice positive note to conclude on, giving some measure of hope for the game as it bounced back from its darkest moment and returned with a perennial underdog-making-good storyline.
After some more thought, however, I think the Strike of 1994 is the proper stopping point. Not all stories, especially true stories, have happy endings, and ‘94 just seemed to ring true. That season was a time of change for the game itself, with realignment to three divisions in each league, expansion in the National League, and the eventual introduction of interleague play, but it also marked a turning point in my own relationship with the game.
I didn’t drift away from baseball out of anger over the strike like many people did, but because I was a teenager and simply had other stuff going on in my life. This also coincided with a roughly two decade run of abysmal baseball from my Royals, which didn’t help either. I still kept an eye on the game, albeit on the periphery, but I didn’t really get sucked back in again until around 2012, when the Royals finally began to show signs of life again on the way to their improbable run to back-to-back World Series in 2014-15.
That brought me fully back on board, but it’s still not quite the same. Don’t get me wrong— I hold the 2015 World Series win up as my highest moment as a sports fan, but baseball will never matter to me as much as it did from 1985-94. That’s just a fact.
I’m not saying that baseball really was better back then. That kind of thing is completely subjective.
My grandpa, who watched guys like DiMaggio and Ted Williams play, and who taught me more about baseball history than anyone, probably looked down his nose at the baseball of my youth in the same way that I view baseball today. He likely even made his fair share of comments on the matter, but I was too wrapped up in my own infatuation to notice.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if any of my three sons— coincidentally, My Three Sons was the name of the baseball card shop in the small town where I grew up— all of whom have shown interest in baseball at varying levels, eventually look back at baseball in the 2020s with the same kind of nostalgia I feel for my own golden era. Every age, no matter how it is defined, has its own delights and wonders, as well as its own flaws. It’s as much about us as the game itself, and I suspect that is at the core of baseball’s immortality.
The game continues to persevere even after a century of seismic change and evolution, much to the chagrin of its critics. It consistently shoots itself in the foot, and doomsday prophets constantly predict its impending death. They really come out of the woodwork after a shift in media or technology or a radical rule change that threatens to undermine the sport’s identity altogether.
We’re about to experience a slew of these in 2023 (most of which I am in favor of), and already the traditionalists are losing their minds. Nevertheless, I expect Opening Day 2023 to come and go without any major cataclysms. In fact, if the rule changes manage to bring the stolen base back in vogue, I will personally consider them a rousing success. Stick with this newsletter long enough and you will definitely discover that I’m a massive proponent of stolen bases.
What I’m discovering as I delve deeper and deeper into the research to get this project off the ground is that there is a perfectly valid, if unscientific reason for a man like myself to still care so much about baseball. Simply put, this stupid little game is magic.
I can feel the sabermetricians cringe as they read that. Nevertheless, I stand by my statement. Don’t get me wrong— I like stats too. I’m even willing to concede that within the context of baseball, math can actually be sort of fun. But let’s keep things in perspective, shall we?
No one is out there composing poems about WAR. (Wins Above Replacement, not the senseless slaughter of millions, of which there is an abundance of poetic material.) With the possible exception of Moneyball, movies aren’t made about advanced stats. I don’t remember compiling my OPS in little league. But I do remember the time I broke out of a long slump by belting a ground rule double into a cornfield in Easton, KS. It felt like lightning surged through my bat. I imagine the echoes of that adrenaline rush will stick with me until the day I die.
That’s the magic I’m talking about. You can call it nostalgia, or you can call it cliché. You can call me a cornball, but that doesn’t make it any less real to an eight year old. I’m not going to try to wax poetic about it because I’m not even sure it’s something a forty year old man can fully understand, except through the vagueness of memory, but I do know it’s addictive. And like everything that’s addictive, it will always call you back.
Sure, most of us will go through moments of cold turkey, and some us will believe we’ve moved on for good. Then that old familiar itch will return, triggered by something that might otherwise seem inconsequential.
You’re out for a walk with the family on a beautiful summer evening and you hear the crack of a bat coming from the park down the block.
Maybe you’re messing around on YouTube during your downtime at work and it randomly auto-plays grainy video from a big league game you attended when you were ten.
Perhaps you spot a packet of Big League Chew on the bottom shelf at the convenience store.
Or you’re scrolling through the radio stations in the car and you stumble upon the voice of the play-by-play announcer you listened to every night when you were a kid.
It doesn’t take much and you’re chasing that first high all over again. And what is nostalgia if not chasing that first high, even if you know you’ll never really achieve it again. But that’s okay. We’re talking about baseball here, not heroin. It’s okay to relapse.
That’s the purpose of Powder Blue Nostalgia in a nutshell. It’s not to deride baseball in the 2020’s or any other era, even if I do take the occasional shot at them in good fun. Nor is it to present the period of 1985-94 as the peak of baseball’s existence. I’m not arguing that it was. But it was the time when baseball was magic to me, and I want to celebrate it.
I will do my best to evoke a bygone era when speed ruled the basepaths, the turf was artificial, the leagues were separate, the players still had personalities, and of course, when powder blue was the most fashionable color in the world. (At least for a little while.) By necessity, some of my own experiences will find their way into this narrative. Rather than detracting from your interest, I hope they will only encourage your own recollections.
If we do this right, this blog can be about more than just baseball. But make no mistake— baseball is the conduit. If you’re too young to remember the eighties and nineties, hopefully I can do them justice by re-creating the bits and pieces from the diamond that mattered most to me. And if you were there, and if you remember even a little bit, I invite you to travel back in time with me.
We can chase that high together.