Excerpt from "A Message to Baseball"

Over the Years

Thousands of them have been frustrated for a long time. It's been nearly fifty years since other team sports started passing baseball, the game they loved. They are men and women, young and old from the 1840's to the 21st century who have never lost their love for the game. They are past their own deaths but have carefully watched baseball's decline.

They are men who had played some of the first baseball games on flat farmland with anything they could find for bases. Some are hardened pitchers from the late 1800's who would throw one pitch at a batter's head and then follow it with a spitball dancing up to the plate. They are women baseball and softball players from the 1940's to the 1960's who received lots of well-deserved attention in national tournaments. Some are parents who invested many years of their lives helping their children learn to play the game.

Now that they are free from day-to-day earthly concerns, it is easier to see the beauty of the game and its problems. In fact, they agree about nearly every part of the game except for one: whether there should be a designated hitter. No matter how many times they tried to get an answer on that issue, "That One Great Scorer" would say it was just too much fun watching baseball executives try to figure it out.

While baseball remained the same, professional football began to get more and more attention. After the famous overtime championship football game in New York in 1958, people started taking professional football more seriously. A number of baseball players and fans from over the previous two centuries started getting restless.

After installing the twenty-four second clock, professional basketball started gaining on baseball in popularity. In 1979, college basketball had its most watched championship game when two future professional superstars, one from Michigan and the other from Indiana, played against each other for the first time. They went on to improve professional basketball until a player from North Carolina took the game to unheard of popularity. All the while, baseball didn't make progress.

By the early twenty-first century, those who had built baseball up over the previous two centuries began to notice that fewer children in the United States were interested in the sport. Football stadiums and basketball arenas were filling up while the ballparks often had room to spare. They knew something had to be done.

They realized baseball's leaders weren't going to allow their game to reach its potential. They nagged and pleaded with "That One Great Scorer" for decades. Finally, the time was right. "That One Great Scorer" gave some general directions and they had the green light. Since the leaders of baseball hadn't found ways to keep their sport at its best, baseball's executives would need to get a message from the past. Those who had originally built the game and took it to its greatest heights would straighten out their juniors.

They knew what had to be done, but who would take the message? A great player? A manager or an executive? Someone with a colorful past or a respected reputation? Someone from long ago or someone more recent? A man was selected, the plan was put together, and the message was sent on a hot summer night last August.