I am a baseball paleo-traditionalist. The money has ruined the sport, like it has distorted and ruined every sport we kids of the 1950s and 1960s grew up cheering.
I grew up in a minor league town-- Asheville, NC. While Asheville is still a Pirates farm team, the MLB industry has terminally damaged American minor league ball.
The cheating-- especially in 2017-- has made me a baseball monk, no longer a fan (though I was born 3rd-Generation Red Sox Nation in 1949).
I can't even hate the Yankees any more, lol, they've had too many good ones this century: C.C., Tanaka, Jeter, Aaron Judge, the list goes on.
These latest rules changes, like about how many batters a relief pitcher must face, besides the DH and regular-season interleague play, are deal-breakers for me. Of course, I don't buy TV access, so it's become progressively easier to not even know who's leading the AL East, or anything that might once have held more importance.
I have not watched a live baseball game since 2017, when friends invited me to a game in San Francisco, Madison Bumgarner was pitching, in the middle of an off season for him and the Giants.
Besides my friends in Frisco, I wanted to see two things: Bumgarner pitch like he had proven himself time and time again, and besides that, hit a home run. He hammered the homer, a flat-trajectory line drive to left that slammed off the wall above the equipment entrance 20 feet past the fence, but gave up three, and the Cards won.
It's good to see Judge on the brink of the record he's chasing, in a possible Triple Crown season, one of the most statistically dominating seasons a player has ever had.
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