Dream cleavers

 The Crotchety Old Guy emerges far too often these days from the carping past, which I suppose is a function of being, well, a crotchety old guy. Seems I'm always shaking a bony liver-spotted fist at some modern outrage or another, like why people can't figure out roundabouts or what this bank fee is for.

Today the modern outrage is baseball, and why it insists on mucking up everything it touches.

It's a sport that more than any other in America bows slavishly to its past, and then it picks up a can of spray paint and scrawls graffiti all over it. This is because, like every professional sport in 2021, it's a thoroughly corporate enterprise, with thoroughly corporate sensibilities. Every good thing about its product it will find a way to ruin if given enough too much time to think about it.

 Remember when baseball was a brisk, lively game, a pleasant American way to while away two hours outdoors on a summer afternoon?

Great, let's move half  the games indoors and slow them to a three, three-and-a-half-hour crawl.

Games last too long now that they've been slowed to a three, three-and-a-half hour crawl?

Great, let's gimmick it up by starting extra innings with a runner already on second base.

And then there's that charming little tribute to baseball's past out in Dyersville, Iowa ...

Well. The powers-that-be in Major League Baseball have found a way to screw that up, too.

Enshrined as a national icon in 1989's love letter to baseball, "Field of Dreams," the Field of Dreams in Dyersville became first a humble diversion for devotees of the film and travelers bored by the drive across Iowa. Thirty-two years later, it's now a fully commissioned Tourist Trap. 

There's an events center and a place to buy souvenirs and food and baseball caps, and all its quaint humbleness has vanished. I know this because MLB has decided to insert its grubby mitts into the place, too.

In August, the Yankees and White Sox will arrive to play a major-league game there. Of course, they won't play it on the Field of Dreams. They'll play it in a brand-new 8,000-seat ballpark a few yards east of the FoD, and of course they'll play it under the lights.

If Shoeless Joe Jackson came walking out of the corn today, I suspect he'd come bearing a torch and a can of gasoline.

In any event, I know all this because the other day one of my former journalism colleagues, Ed Breen, wrote about it for a radio station Marion, In. The newspaper for which we both worked, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, reprinted it.

You can read it here, and I encourage you to do so. It's a far more eloquent takedown of this abomination than I've managed in this space.

"Ruined by success and greed," is Ed's verdict on the whole business.

And by people who should know better, but have long forgotten what made their game great to begin with.