Confessions Of A Baseball Purist
What's Right And Wrong With Baseball As Seen From The Best Seat In The House
by Mark Hyman and Jon Miller
Simon & Schuster, 1998 | Buy the book
Chapter 3
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Twenty years from now, when baseball fans look back at the 1990s, they'll have a name for this era: they'll call it Baseball's Golden Age.

You heard me, the Golden Age.

I can hear them now. And I can hear the reverence in their voices.

"The problem with the game today is there's absolutely no hitting..."

"To win a batting crown in the nineties, you had to hit three-seventy. That's right, three-seventy! And if Tony Gwynn got in one of his grooves, three-eighty. Three-eighty!"

And...

"Power. In those days, we had some real sluggers in the game. In the nineties, Frank Thomas batted three-fifty and hit four-hundred-fifty-foot homers; Albert Belle hit ninety-eight home runs in two years -- and still batted three-hundred; Mark McGwire hit fifty-two home runs one year and fifty-eight the next; Ken Griffey Jr. hit fifty-six home runs, batted three-oh-four, and robbed a guy of a home run every game! And I haven't even mentioned Alex Rodriguez, who had the best hitting year for a shortstop of all time!"

This is not a joke. These are transcripts of actual conversations that will take place in the year 2018.

Let's make a resolution. Let's start giving proper respect to baseball in the 1990s. It's as good as it has ever been, and maybe even better.
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Copyright © 1998 by Jon Miller and Mark Hyman. Excerpted with permission.