Rick Kaplan
Staff Writer

OAKLAND (June 3) – It was the 1950’s. We worshipped our baseball heroes.

We wanted to be just like them.

But to my grandfather, a tireless curmudgeon who hunted up prospects as a birddog for the Yankees and the Giants in his day, my stars were all unworthy, lazy bums.

I quietly suffered while he complained about Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron.

Click below for more!“They don’t hustle. They don’t hit the cut-off man. They’re all spoiled. They don’t know how to play the game. In my day they never would have made it out of the low minors.”

Can you even imagine challenging Frank Robinson’s intensity and power, or questioning Duke Snider’s defensive skills and clutch hitting?

That was no problem for Grandpa. The sermons about the superiority of the “old days” continued unabated at Grandpa’s flat on Bennet Ave. throughout numerous Hall of Fame careers. The steady stream of vitriol never even paused for as much as a pitching gem from Bob Gibson or Koufax, or a diving catch by Yaz or Clemente.

Were Tris Speaker and Cobb that much better than Mays and Mantle? Would the Maris of 1961 really have had a hard time starting for the 1939 Newark Bears, a Yankee farm club, in the International League?

Was there something about the game back then that was really that good?

In the early ’90s, I had the good fortune to hear the great Ernie Banks talk about his formative years in the Negro Leagues. He spoke nostalgically of a baseball culture in which the game back then was the number one thing virtually 24/7 for everyone associated with “the national pastime.” The whole experience of coming up in the ranks was kind of like attending a baseball university, in which a degree not only admitted you to the fraternity of professional baseball players but indebted you for the rest of your life to the responsibility of teaching the game to others.

The older players were the professors and the rookies were the students, and the long bus and train rides were an opportunity to dissect game situations and prepare for any eventuality that might come up on the diamond.

One gets an undeniable sense in reading about the game, and listening to Marty Lurie’s wonderful interviews of veteran players, that there was a similar respect and modesty and commitment – a love of the game – and a wide-eyed thirst for knowledge and decidedly lower profile for individualism throughout the rest of the baseball world.

As late as the mid-1970’s, when we felt the first rumblings of free agency, the minimum salary in MLB was only $7500 (That’s right, seventy-five hundred dollars a year). Major league baseball players were part of the same world as the fans at that time, and often lived in the same communities. They worked at second jobs during the winter to make ends meet.

In 1958, if you lived in Fargo, N.D., Roger Maris might have bagged your groceries.

This, of course, has all changed dramatically. Sometimes the players, and the clubs, seem more involved with business than baseball. They sometimes seem to place themselves above the team.

When I was a kid, players from opposing teams didn’t fraternize on the field. Today, however, a bloop single sometimes seems like it is as much an opportunity for a business meeting at first base as it is a chance for a rally.

The base runner in 2006 MLB complains to his opponent, “Hey, I’ll take whatever I can get the way I’m going. My average has dropped thirty points”

“It depends if you’re talking Dow Jones or NASDAQ. Maybe you need a new broker?” quips the first baseman.

This may be an exaggeration, but one wonders what all those future free agents are so busy chatting about at second base in the middle of a pennant race.

“Hey, I heard you guys serve yellow-fin sushi and Don Perignon at the pre-game. Save me some, I’m coming over next month.”

Maybe they do care more about their mutual funds and endorsements than the players of old. Maybe they spend more time on the DL. Maybe even a lot of them use performance-enhancing substances. And maybe a lot has changed about what it means to be a major league ballplayer.

But you want to know something? I have been looking over some of my recent columns, and guess what I found. Yeah, I was talking about these guys not hitting the cutoff man, about them not running out infield dribblers, about guys “not knowing how to play the game.”

I even chose an All-Throwback Team (which lamented the decline of the old ways and celebrated the players today who have grass stains before batting practice is over), a column some of you may recall.

But then I looked in the mirror. I saw someone I haven’t seen for a long, long time. Someone very familiar and very old. And he was still ranting.

I began thinking about how some day, today will be the “old days.” And I’m sure there were old-timers in the days of Ruth and DiMaggio and Paige who whined about how those greats paled next to the Nap Lajoies and Honus Wagners and Smokey Joe Williams of bygone days.

Then it all hit me.

The truth is that these guys today are probably BETTER than ballplayers have ever been. And that’s how it’s always been. Each generation is bigger, faster, and better trained. They actually study the game harder today, and more scientifically, even if it’s not on a cross-country train.

They probably spend more time on the DL, not because they are lazy and spoiled and pampered, but because they are bigger and stronger, and the forces involved result in more injuries, and because they just plain play harder and faster than baseball has ever been played before. They make plays every day routinely – we even watch these web gems every night – that would have been considered once-in-a-lifetime moments fifty years ago.

Maybe we all need to look in the mirror. And when you do, don’t be too surprised if you see your grandpa.