What's your favorite period/era in baseball?

[David Watts]

Currently playing the 1921 season and wow am I having a hard time getting used to all the high batting averages. Seeing entire teams hitting .300+ is not something I'm used to and to tell you the truth, so far I'm not a huge fan. Maybe it will grow on me.

Got me to thinking about my favorite style of baseball and what period best represents it. I simply love the 70's. Pitchers are still throwing complete games, but bullpens are starting to evolve. Closers are just becoming a factor, but they aren't a 9th inning requirement. I like the 80's till around 86, then I start to get a little squeamish. The 90's are out and so are the early 2000-s, at least until baseball started to get it's strike zone and injection problems somewhat under control. But, even when the offense returned to normal, I'm still bugged by the way bullpens have evolved into such a huge part of the game. I can't stand seeing pitchers enter a game to pitch to 1 or 2 batters. Every time I fire up the MLB quickstart, I end up quitting for the same reason, too many relief pitchers. I guess it's my inner Goose Gossage coming out So, in the end, I play very little modern day baseball.

Overall, I would say 1947-1984 would be the years I love best.

Oh and the Deadball Period bores the socks off of me. Probably because I don't manage. If I did, all the small ball decisions would probably make it exciting, but just watching, I get bored pretty quick.

[Hrycaj]

Such an interesting question. My default answer has always been the 1980's because that is when I developed a strong interest in the game, and childhood nostalgia will always weigh heavy. I'll will always love the players from the 80's as well. I feel like you had a little of everything. Power, speed, dominate starters, Punch and Judy hitters, different batting stances and pitch deliveries. However, when I look back on YouTube at those games the cookie cutter stadiums kill me every time. Soooo boring. Stadiums today are just simply great. Really hard to find a true dud outside of Oakland. (Sorry A's fans I'm sure there are many of you that like it for your own reasons).

So having said that I also love baseball history and am fascinated with all of the early decades as well. I love how the game has evolved. Especially the dead ball/live era transition. I love trying to recreate that era in ootp fictionally. (It's not as easy as it sounds).

So a little long winded but I thought it was a great topic to expand on.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Hrycaj

Such an interesting question. My default answer has always been the 1980's because that is when I developed a strong interest in the game, and childhood nostalgia will always weigh heavy. I'll will always love the players from the 80's as well. I feel like you had a little of everything. Power, speed, dominate starters, Punch and Judy hitters, different batting stances and pitch deliveries. However, when I look back on YouTube at those games the cookie cutter stadiums kill me every time. Soooo boring. Stadiums today are just simply great. Really hard to find a true dud outside of Oakland. (Sorry A's fans I'm sure there are many of you that like it for your own reasons).

So having said that I also love baseball history and am fascinated with all of the early decades as well. I love how the game has evolved. Especially the dead ball/live era transition. I love trying to recreate that era in ootp fictionally. (It's not as easy as it sounds).

So a little long winded but I thought it was a great topic to expand on.

Maybe that's why I'm such a 70's fan. That was when I went to my first Tiger game and when I developed my love for baseball. Agree about the stadiums except for one thing, Tiger Stadium was and always will be the best stadium ever created. Especially before they put those blue and orange seats in.

[USF]

I would have to say the 80's as well.

Growing up in Toronto that is when baseball really took off. The Jays were winning after some dismal beginning seasons.

I also use to love the Astros uniforms and watching any game in the Astrodome especially considering my favorite alltime player was Nolan Ryan. They also had some classic matchups with the Dodgers, Mets and Phillies back then. I remember Ryan vs. Rose in one playoff game where Ryan threw something like 17 pitches to him in Philadelphia and Rose kept fouling off the ball and finally got a single. Ryan looked at him at first base and just shrugged his shoulders. I later met up with Pete at a sports store in Vegas. I didn't even know he was in town and I bought his book. I asked him how it was to face Nolan Ryan and he looked at me and paused and said that was one tough SOB.

Jason

[TribeFanInNC]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Currently playing the 1921 season and wow am I having a hard time getting used to all the high batting averages. Seeing entire teams hitting .300+ is not something I'm used to and to tell you the truth, so far I'm not a huge fan. Maybe it will grow on me.

The part I can't get used to about this era is all the errors. So many unearned runs. Drives me up the wall. just because it isn't something we are really used to seeing.

I can usually appreciate pretty much any era for what it is. Historically, I guess I've played a lot in the 60's, starting at or just before expansion for a couple reasons:

1) It's where the Indians went from a first division team to what we now have come to expect from a Cleveland sports franchise.
2) It's when the Yankees quit kicking everyone's butt. I find the 20s-50s American League less fun because it just feels like you are playing for second place. 60s AL doesn't really have any super dominant teams after the first couple years of the M & M boys.
3) Expansion is fun from both the angle of the new franchise and protecting the assets of existing franchises (though it gives you short term goofy stats sometimes too).

[mitchkenn]

grew up watching late 50's to mid 60's ball, so that's one of my top eras. i mean, Mays, Maricial, McCovey, Aaron, Koufax, Gibson, Clemente - who could hate that? Plus it helps i actually saw a few of those players in Candlestick ... But loving the history of the game and how it evolved, the deadball era holds a lot of appeal to me, and that's what i end up playing most of the time ... (sorry Mr. Watts! )

[Hrycaj]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Maybe that's why I'm such a 70's fan. That was when I went to my first Tiger game and when I developed my love for baseball. Agree about the stadiums except for one thing, Tiger Stadium was and always will be the best stadium ever created. Especially before they put those blue and orange seats in.

That was a given. Games at the corner were the best. I'm glad they are letting young kids play ball there still. Just feels right.

[canaveral]

I suppose it has to do with what you grew up with or when you first really started paying attention to baseball. For me it was the 1969 World Series Mets, which my friends and I in upstate NY marveled over and found so exciting. And it was such a great alternative to the Yankees dynasty.

I began to feed my interest by playing the tabletop game Negamco on my own, actually finishing out an entire NL schedule using ratings from 1969 first, then 1970, and finally 1971. I let my friends vote for the MVP and Cy Young awards.

Then I was in a play-by-mail draft league from 1973 to 1986 using Statis-Pro and BLM, drifted away for a while, then came back trying various computer-based games. I worked my way up to Diamond Mind, which was great for stats and detailed managing, but too limited with no career play and too expensive.

I then found OOTP through continued Google searches and it's been a dream come true. It's almost too hard to believe all of MLB history is at my fingertips and I can do anything imaginable with it.

I also continue with fantasy baseball play in CBS Sports leagues. This keeps me involved with present day action because I don't really have any one favorite team now. If I had to pick one though, I'd still say the Mets.

So, to finally answer the question, in my continued historical play, I favor the period from about 1985 to 2010 as most desirable statistically. I find the current lack of scoring somewhat boring, though I do note homeruns and runs/game are up this year. And thus, my favorite players include the likes of John Olerud, Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Mike Cameron, Bobby Abreu, Edgar Martinez, Javier Vazquez, and Curtis Granderson (his 23 triples in 2007 was fascinating).

[TribeFanInNC]

Originally Posted by David Watts

Maybe that's why I'm such a 70's fan. That was when I went to my first Tiger game and when I developed my love for baseball. Agree about the stadiums except for one thing, Tiger Stadium was and always will be the best stadium ever created. Especially before they put those blue and orange seats in.

I dunno. I believe my visit to Tiger Stadium was the last time I ever peed in a trough. I gotta admit, I like the modern functioning toilets in new stadiums

Seriously though, I'm jealous of your nostalgia. Cleveland had the worst stadium ever. Jacobs Field felt like moving from a Model A to a Ferrari.

[smiller]

Like others, I have to go with the decade I grew up in -- the 1950s. There's a great little book, "Aaron to Zuverink," which has capsule profiles of just about everyone who played then, including their current job (the book came out in 1982). It's a lot of fun to thumb through and very nostalgic.

[swoboda]

Mid 60s to mid 70s for me, although I am definitely appreciative of other eras I guess we all had happy childhoods, at least when it comes to baseball

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Hrycaj

That was a given. Games at the corner were the best. I'm glad they are letting young kids play ball there still. Just feels right.

Right around this time last year I was back in Michigan for the first time since 2005. My buddy took my wife and I to the corner and I almost cried. But, the flag pole was still there, painted gray(gray because Billy Crystal used Tiger Stadium to film 61) with parts showing the blue and even some green where the paint had chipped. There was a guy out on a riding lawn mower cutting the field. Standing there at the flag pole and an looking in at home plate, it was amazing how far away it looked. Really put into perspective that Larry Herndon line drive off the facing of the upper deck in straight away center.

Along with the guy mowing the field, another guy was there selling shirts and hats with Navin Field Groundscrew emblazoned on them. Bought one of each. I'm glad as well that they are going to turn it into a facility for youth baseball Just sad that those Navin Field guys will lose there spot.

[Reed]

Deadball era. This is where modern baseball started. During this time span (1902-1920) you see the progress from singles hitters to Home run hitters. Going from pitcher dominate to hitter dominate. Seeing the players perform that you only heard about.
To immerse in the game I got 2 books from SABR that has 4-5 page biography of 400 players in that era along with articles about team owners, commissioners etc.. It really is amazing the hardships most of the players went through such as leaving home at 14 or working in coal mines at that age. It is a weird feeling having Ray Chapman on your team (who was a very good player) knowing this is the month he got killed IRL. I think I would have quit OOTP if he got killed in my game. That would have been to freaky.

[Padreman]

Steroid

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by TribeFanInNC

I dunno. I believe my visit to Tiger Stadium was the last time I ever peed in a trough. I gotta admit, I like the modern functioning toilets in new stadiums

Seriously though, I'm jealous of your nostalgia. Cleveland had the worst stadium ever. Jacobs Field felt like moving from a Model A to a Ferrari.

I got to see a game at the old Cleveland park. My folks surprised me back in the day by extending a trip to Cedar Point into a trip to Cleveland for a baseball game as well. I had a great time and actually liked the stadium. Only part that was frightening was the old guy sitting in the row in front of us getting into a fist fight with the 20 something stooge sitting in front of him. Scared the living daylights out of me.

You never knew what you would see at Tiger Stadium. I still to this day love the smell of cigars, simply because they remind me of Tiger Stadium. My dad actually lived the real version of that Looney Tunes joint by getting a seat basically directly behind a pole. Still remember being around 9 years old and sitting next to this little old lady. Complete stranger. She taught me how to keep score. The beach ball years were annoying, especially because they led to the tastes great, less filling years and then the even worse chant that all led to the bleachers being shut down for a period. Oh and every game you went to, you had to have at least 2 hotdogs. 1 from a vendor in the stands, a sweaty dog. Another from the concession stand...a charred dog.

Other thing I remember was for the first 2 or 3 times my mom and dad took me to Tiger Stadium it was a requirement that we got as lost as physically possible once we got near the stadium. Heck, sometimes you could even see the park and dad would end up missing an exit or 2 or 3. One of those times, we didn't it make it to the park until the game was just about to start. You could hear the National Anthem as we got out of our car. Back then we never had tickets in advance, we just purchased them when we got to the game. Still remember walking to the park and this guy that worked at the stadium stopped us and asked if we needed tickets. He sold my dad 4 tickets and we ended up in the row directly behind the Tigers dugout. Greatest seats I've ever sat in. Today, you couldn't pay me to sit there. Too scared of getting drilled by a foul ball, but as back then the stupidity of youth ruled.

[TribeFanInNC]

Yeah, Cleveland Stadium had those poles too. In fact, now that you remind me, one of our seats on my visit to Tiger Stadium was behind a pole, but luckily we could slide over one spot to get a mostly unobstructed sight line.

Could you imagine if someone built a stadium today with like 1000 pole-obstructed seats.?

[cheo25]

I grew up in the late '70s/'80s so that era from the mid-70s all the way to the end of the '80s when I started college is my favorite. I loved the fact there was no interleague play, and that the National League would not adopt the designated hitter. I loved that the NL played with a slightly unbalanced schedule, and that even the teams in the other division made two trips to each city. Yet, teams ended the season exclusively in intradivisional play in the NL. There were fewer teams and so you felt like you knew all the players on all the teams, even the ninth or 10th pitcher on a pitching staff. There are too many teams today, too many opponents that only make one visit to a city, and, of course, interleague play, a pox only surpassed on the misery scale by the designated hitter.

To the poster who declared his love for Tiger Stadium, I feel the same way about the Astrodome. It was my first ballpark as a small child, and though the Dome seems like a cookie-cutter, the scoreboard in its day had no equal. Loved the animated cartoons they used to play there as well, and the PA voice of the late J. Fred Duckett (Number 25, Left Fielder, Jo-say Cruuuuuzzzzzzz).

The Astrodome will always be my favorite, even though I think PNC Park in Pittsburgh is the most beautiful baseball stadium I've ever visited with PETCO Park in San Diego being a close second. But though Minute Maid Park feels more like a baseball stadium, the Astrodome will always be No. 1 for me.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by TribeFanInNC

Yeah, Cleveland Stadium had those poles too. In fact, now that you remind me, one of our seats on my visit to Tiger Stadium was behind a pole, but luckily we could slide over one spot to get a mostly unobstructed sight line.

Could you imagine if someone built a stadium today with like 1000 pole-obstructed seats.?

Still think it's neat that the Rangers incorporated a Tiger Stadium like look to their right field including the poles. Of course, that stadium is already on the way out, so who knows what their new one will be like. Did read that they wanted to maintain the old park style.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by cheo25

I grew up in the late '70s/'80s so that era from the mid-70s all the way to the end of the '80s when I started college is my favorite. I loved the fact there was no interleague play, and that the National League would not adopt the designated hitter. I loved that the NL played with a slightly unbalanced schedule, and that even the teams in the other division made two trips to each city. Yet, teams ended the season exclusively in intradivisional play in the NL. There were fewer teams and so you felt like you knew all the players on all the teams, even the ninth or 10th pitcher on a pitching staff. There are too many teams today, too many opponents that only make one visit to a city, and, of course, interleague play, a pox only surpassed on the misery scale by the designated hitter.

To the poster who declared his love for Tiger Stadium, I feel the same way about the Astrodome. It was my first ballpark as a small child, and though the Dome seems like a cookie-cutter, the scoreboard in its day had no equal. Loved the animated cartoons they used to play there as well, and the PA voice of the late J. Fred Duckett (Number 25, Left Fielder, Jo-say Cruuuuuzzzzzzz).

The Astrodome will always be my favorite, even though I think PNC Park in Pittsburgh is the most beautiful baseball stadium I've ever visited with PETCO Park in San Diego being a close second. But though Minute Maid Park feels more like a baseball stadium, the Astrodome will always be No. 1 for me.

Got to attend several games at the Astrodome once I moved to Shreveport. Thought I would hate it, but ended up liking it. One thing I learned after attending my first game though, was that air conditioning could freeze you out depending where your seats were. Minute Maid on the other hand can get rather steamy when the roof is closed. Almost has an indoor swimming pool feel to it.

[The Game]

For MLB play i prefer the 30's. Some of the best players in that era and i like 3-4 man rotations no pen and catchers are just players not superstars. SS's are not 6'5. Lots of speed. Plus perhaps some of the best parks.