Thanks to Tom Engelhardt for this great idea of Robert Lipsyte’s, sent to me after I told Tom that as a baseball traditionalist, I wanted to end the DH, the wild card, etc. and even go back to the “dead-ball” era. This is magnificent:

“First of all, it would be righting an almost century-old wrong. Early in the twentieth century, the home run was considered a crude gesture devoid of true craft, when players thought about it at all. Remember, pre-Babe, the leading slugger of 1913, Frank ‘Home Run’ Baker, led the American League with 12 homers.

“The world changed. Baseball was ever less about strategy, smarts, and speed — who steals home anymore? — and somehow everyday life was no longer about persuasion, compromise, and trust; or international politics about debate, diplomacy, and détente.

“By the time I became a fan in the 1940s, the Ballantine (beer) Blast or the White Owl (cigar) Wallop were already a major part of the game and a homer could suddenly turn the tide of a taut pitcher’s battle, just as a mega-bomb could end a war. Duck and cover, this one is going, going, gone. What was the Cold War, if it wasn’t about two powerhouse sluggers waving big bats that could clear the bases forever?“Will banning the home run lead to banning the bomb?

“Maybe not, but it could save the game. If baseball is truly our national pastime, mirror, and harbinger, it could follow the nation down the drain if we don’t do something. Waiting for baseball’s current wave of Latin and Asian guest workers to keep the game alive for us seems like the same pathetic passivity we’ve been showing these last years to the lying, cheating, vicious anti-social attitudes of the present government.

“A simple fix (for baseball anyway): Any ball hit out of the park is an out. Only the rare inside-the-park homer, typically a combination of speedy running and sloppy fielding, an example of very small ball, would still be a four-bagger.”