Certainly there was and is a mental strategic/tactical aspect to baseball. The strategies have simply started to change. If the strategy and tactics remain static, then the mental component decreases as everything becomes by the book. The mental aspect today is greater than previously, because the book is being rewritten and at present, there is no accepted book. That said, I don't see baseball as standing out as a mental/strategic sport. Football is much more so, if for no other reasons than 22 men are involved in virtually every play, vastly multiplying the possible permutations and that things happen so quickly. Baseball is a sport in which a lot fewer players are actually doing something significant at a given time. I think fans view baseball as more mental and strategic largely because it is less violent and because it is slower. The slowness gives fans time to observe and assess the unfolding tactics and strategy. You can observe how the fielders are positioned prior to the first pitch to a hitter. Then you focus on just the pitcher, catcher, and hitter, unless there is a baserunner who might steal. Then you follow the batted ball. As a fan, you can take in the whole thing and have time between pitches to think about what you've seen. This is a lot harder in sports with 10 to 22 guys in motion.
I don't blame today's pitchers at all. I began as a fan at a time with very dominant pitchers like Gibson, Marichal, Koufax, Drysdale and to a lesser degree Bunning and Short. I also saw Robin Roberts and Spahn. Roberts and Spahn were different styles than the dominant pitchers of the 60s. We wont have those pitchers again, because baseball changed the rules. The mound was lowered. The high strike became a ball. The ball itself was livened. Bats became concave at their end, sot that behaved a little like a corked bat. Pitching style needed to change and that included IP.
The sluggers who were killing pitching -- their weakness was discovered and exploited through shifts. It makes the game different, but the shifts certainly were a mental/tactical counter-adjustment to the, especially left-handed, power guys like Howard. If you are going to hit almost all of your ground balls to one side of 2B, it would be the opposite of the other team playing a mental game to leave holes in the IF for those balls to go through. Keep your HR swing, but know that we will force you to give up BA.
To appreciate today's better than average pitchers, one has only to look at last night's game and see what today's hitters can do against a string of lesser pitchers.
In a game of move - counter move -- new plan, strategy can never be static. Working the count used to be a very big deal, because it got the starter out of the game sooner. The obvious solution was to have a stronger bullpen, so that it wasn't as big a step down from starter to middle reliever. Most teams have failed to implement this change successfully, because there aren't nearly enough good middle relievers to go around.
I think you rue not the lack of strategy or mental part of game. You are nostalgic for an older, smaller ball/manufactured runs, version of baseball -- what experience said worked years ago. We've both been fans long enough to witness several different approaches to pitching and to offense. Baseball seems to change roughly every decade or so. It is not alone in that. Basketball and football have changed every bit as much. It grates on some, because baseball emphasizes the old-timey, compare stats across eras, nostalgic view of the support although we all know it was one heck of a lot harder to hit a HR back in Babe Ruth's day, new HR kings were still seen as a mind- and game-shattering sacrilege. It led to what I think was the first record book asterisk.
