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I should add, in the event some might have taken my comment "charter" players wrong...
I don't wish to see them gone because of any possible statistical difference with more modern players - I wish them retired because it is only then that the league takes on it's own "persona" so-to-speak. In Coover's novel is the following description...
""Of course, the abrupt beginning had its disadvantages. It was, in a sense, too arbitrary, too inexplicable. In spite of the almost excessive warmth he felt toward these first ballplayers, it always troubled him that their life histories were so unavailable to him: What had a great player already in his thirties been doing for the previous ten years? It was much better once a kind of continuity had been established, and when new players had taken over the league who had their whole careers still ahead of them. It was, in fact, when the last Year I player had retired that Henry felt the Association had come of age, and when, a couple of years ago, the last veteran of Year I, old ex-Chancellor Barnaby North, had died, he had felt an odd sense of relief; the touch with the deep past was now purely "historic", its ambiguity only natural.""
THAT is my reason for putting 50 years between the start of a league and me, as commissioner, owner, or manager.
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