Of all the major sports, baseball has the oldest fanbase. It cultivates this, in large measure selling itself as a nostalgic, stat-based sport. This is silly and it has led to lazy fans living in the past, who just assume that the way baseball was played when they were a lot younger is the way it is supposed to be played and always should be played.. Why do I find this very silly? Basically, because while encouraging all-time stats leaders based upon the simple old-timey stats and having announcers who stress playing the game the right way, baseball has made very fundamental changes to the game: dead ball, less dead ball, live ball, less live ball, big strike zone, smaller strikezone, tall mound, short mound, dinky little gloves, bushel basket gloves, day games, night games, no standard playing field. A lot of this is marketing, including periodic major efforts to rebalance the current success of pitchers vs. hitters. The only way you can compare stats from different seasons, different leagues, different home parks is to use adjusted modern stats. Otherwise, comparisons of players based upon the old-timey wins, ERA, BA, HRs, RBIs, Runs stats yield worthless comparisons.
It also should be obvious on its face that the correct strategy for a team to win the most games, which after all is the goal, cannot be the same in a dead ball era and a live ball era, in a high mound big strikezone era and a low mound, smaller strikezone era. It would be foolish for a player or a team not to adjust their approach based upon changes made to the game. When I was a kid, it made a lot more sense to try to get groundball basehits and make contact above most else, because the players had dinky gloves compared to today, teams didn't employ the shift, and the rules favored the pitchers. Not so today. A lot of ground balls lead to a lot of losses.
Every time baseball makes one of these major changes to the nature of the game, baseball, all of its announcers, the baseball writers, and even casual fans should expect that players and teams will change their approach, because "the right way", that is the way most conducive to winning, has been deliberately changed by TPTB. There simply is no right way over multi-year spans. Fans aren't surprised by this in football or basketball (it's amazing how much the relaxation of the walking with the ball rule altered the game of basketball, how much of a difference the 3-point goal mad. ) It's really not at all the game I grew up with.Not surprising, you can't make major rule changes like that without fundamentally altering how teams and players play the game.
