Baseball REALLY Needs to Turn Back The Clock

By Dan Schlossberg (Special from the IBWAA)

***

This article was featured in “Here’s The Pitch” the newsletter of the IBWAA and is shared with permission. This article was published in January 2026.

***

During the days when Major League Baseball consisted of two eight-team leagues, winners went directly to the World Series, playoffs were never scheduled ahead of time, and teams played games in daylight on natural grass.

Players, coaches, and managers voted for All-Star teams but were barred from choosing teammates.

The DH was a pipe-dream even more removed from reality than inter-league play.

The best pitchers went nine innings — sometimes more — and sometimes threw shutouts.

Except for player salaries that were suppressed by today’s standards, it was truly the Golden Era of Baseball.

New York had three teams, California had none, and Baseball From Puerto Rico was shown on New York’s Channel 11 in the middle of the Manhattan winter.

Baseball tickets and baseball cards were affordable too, with the latter used more for flipping and trading than selling.

The Sporting News was a weekly tabloid packed with baseball information, including everything from trade rumors to Triple-A box scores, and had competition only from USA TODAY Baseball Weekly before that paper morphed into USA TODAY Sports Weekly. Rickey Henderson was on the cover of its first issue.

Followers of The National Pastime also had more than a dozen pre-season annuals, including the decorated Street & Smith’s Official Baseball Yearbook, Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball, Sports Quarterly Baseball, Athlon’s, and special editions published by Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News.

Without interference from the yet-to-come internet, newspapers and magazines thrived, educating millions of kids eager to learn not only about the teams and players but also about determining batting averages and ERAs.

During baseball’s Good Old Days, Marvin Miller worked for the Steelworkers Union while the only strikes occurred between the white lines. Baseball had nothing to fear except Fehr himself — and his omnipresent scowl during laborious labor negotiations.

It was a happy time. No advertising on uniforms, no post-season playoff tournament that regularly bounced the best teams from the final rounds, and no inter-league play that twisted once-cherished records.

There were league offices, league presidents, and separate umpiring staffs.

Salaries were kept secret so that envy and jealousy did not rear their ugly heads.

And nobody thought it was a good idea to place free runners on second base to start extra half-inning in an effort to shorten game time — or use an in-game Home Run Derby to decide All-Star Games.

Oh yes, All-Star, World Series, and playoff games were all staged during the day, when the future fans of the game could stay awake right through the end.

As Archie and Edith sang at the start of All in the Family, “Those were the days.”

Anybody who says baseball is better now hasn’t lived through the ‘50s and ‘60s, when baseball had no competition as America’s national game.

As this article proves, there’s a lot to be said about nostalgia.

***

HtP weekend editor Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ grew up during baseball’s Golden Era and thinks it’s time to turn back the clock.