Talking Baseball: Vol. 31
We are talking some baseball.
In this edition of Talking Baseball we are looking at….
The long-standing baseball tradition of yesterday’s players hating the players of today.
My love-hate relationship with the 2026 Pittsburgh Pirates.
Old baseball video games.
Over the past week I have been watching Ken Burns Baseball documentary and I have been absolutely loving it. It’s a perfect combination of 1) Ken Burns usually doing great work, and 2) My love of baseball and learning about the history of the game and seeing how much it has evolved over the years.
One of the funniest things that has stood out to me is that for as much as the game has changed from the dead ball era, to the modern era, to the steroid era, to whatever era today is, there are still a lot of things that ultimately remain the same. And I’m not even talking about the rules or style of play.
I’m mostly talking about how much the players of yesterday absolutely loathe current players and the way they play.
The best example of this was Ty Cobb (who no one could stand when he was alive) hated the way Babe Ruth and Lou Gehring played because, in his view, the power game was a “lazy” way of playing baseball. It didn’t rely on the smart-thinking, strategy and small-ball approach of Cobb’s era.
This was in the 1920s and 30s.
Fast forward to 2026 and the same things are being said.
It usually involves somebody like Goose Gossage gathering whatever New York media members will listen to him yell at clouds every spring training. He will then spend 25 minutes screaming how today’s players are softer than baby shit because relievers don’t throw more than one inning and because base-runners aren’t allowed to steamroll through catchers anymore. Of course, nobody has ever bothered to tell ole Goose that Christy Mathewson and Cy Young would have thought HE was soft for only being a relief pitcher and not throwing 500 innings every year.
But we had another example this week when former New York Yankees catcher (and should-be-Hall-of-Famer) Jorge Posada said he hates watching the modern game because people strike out too much, don’t play small ball enough, and rely too much on formulas and analytics.
It’s especially maddening coming from Posada because he was the perfect player for 2026 and was far ahead of his time.
In fact, if he had played in this era he probably would be viewed even more highly than he already is.
He struck out .. a lot.
He also walked a lot and got on base.
He also hit for power.
He rarely stole bases (20 in his career0, hit sacrifice flies or bunted (one sacrifice bunt in his entire career).
He was everything the modern baseball player is, and he was damn good at it. And he was doing it as a catcher, which made it even more impressive.
His Yankees teams never asked guys like Posada to bunt, steal, or hit-and-run because it would have been non-sensical and a waste of what he was good at. His value was in hitting the ball out of the ballpark or into a gap for multiple bases and multiple runs.
This is, of course, nothing new.
Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan would go on ESPN every Sunday night and rail against anything analytical even though he might have been one of the greatest analytical players ever. Everybody in his time knew he was great and one of the best players of his era. The numbers and people’s understanding of those numbers only shined an even brighter light on him.
Go back even further and look at Ted Williams’ philosophy on hitting. Everything he did, everything he preached and believed at the plate is pretty much exactly what modern hitting coaches preach to their players.
Wait for your pitch and do not swing at pitcher’s pitches (walks are good).
Short, quick swing with an emphasis on generating hard contact (exit velocity).
The slight “upswing” that he felt gave the bat a batter trajectory to the ball approaching the plate (launch angle).
Along with that, there were instances of teams defending Williams (a dead-pull hitter) by shifting their fielders to the right side of the infield because they knew he was trying to pull the ball and hit it hard.
As much as the game has changed, it’s still largely the same.
Sports have a way of matching society, and there is always a societal belief that the younger generation coming after us is more screwed up and dumber than our generation. Athletes live the same way. Even if they are largely the same.
The 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates were one of the worst offensive teams in the league, wasting what should have been a pitching staff that was good enough to compete.
To their credit, they spent the offseason doing quite a bit to address that area and improve it.
They dug into their pitching depth and traded Johan Oviedo for Jhostnyxon Garcia.
They continued that purshit by trading Mike Burrows for Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum and Mason Montgomery.
They spent some actual money in free agency by signing Ryan O’Hearn to their first multi-year free agent deal in over a decade, and then brought in Marcell Ozuna to be the DH.
They aggressively moved shortstop Konnor Griffin through the minor league system and made him the highest-paid player in franchise history, bringing a potential superstar onto the Major League roster at the age of 20.
Esmerlyn Valdez is getting a serious look making the most of it. He is still only 22 years old.
Some of those moves have worked out better (Lowe, O’Hearn) than others (Ozuna), but there is a noticeable improvement. Add in bounce back seasons from Oneil Cruz and Bryan Reynolds, not to mention another strong year from Spencer Horwitz and the potential emergence of Endy Rodriguez, and the Pirates suddenly have one of the most formidable lineups in baseball.
They entered play on Tuesday third in all of Major League Baseball in runs scored, second in on-base percentage and second in OPS.
It is not just a good lineup, it is objectively speaking one of the best lineups in baseball.
In 2025, if they fell behind 2-0 or 3-0 in the first couple of innings, the game was over. There was no point in even watching it anymore. It might as well have been 200 runs or 300 runs. Now? They can fall down by five runs and still have a fighting chance. They might even come back and win as they did on Monday night against the Philadelphia Phillies.
If they had this lineup a year ago, they easily make the playoffs.
That is where the frustration comes in, because for as good as the hitting has been, every other aspect of the team has rapidly gotten worse.
The cost of improving the lineup has been piecing together a below average defensive team, while almost every major pitcher on the roster has significantly regressed from a year ago, while some of them (Paul Skenes, Mitch Keller and Carmen Mlodzinski) have all seen at least one MPH come off of their fastball velocity on average.
Braxton Ashcraft is really the only starting pitcher that has matched or exceeded expectations (and even he has shown some signs of regressing a little in his recent starts), while the bullpen has been a season-changing and season-ruining disaster.
They lead the league in blown saves.
They have lost 11 games when scoring six runs or more, the second-highest total in the league behind only the 12 games that the Colorado Rockies have lost.
They have lost seven games when scoring at least seven runs, tied with the Los Angeles Angels for the most.
They have lost at least six games where they had a win probability of 88% or higher in the eight inning.
If this team had even three more wins going into Tuesday they would be in a wild-card spot.
Five more wins would still have them in serious contention for the division.
It’s a multi-layer problem.
When it comes to the bullpen, that has to rest entirely on the front office and general manager Ben Cherington. He came into this season without really any proven, reliable arms (as much as those things exist in the bullpen) and has sat back and done nothing while that group continues to sabotage the season.
When it comes to the starters (and perhaps even some elements of the bullpen), it’s not hard to ask what new pitching coach Bill Murphy is actually doing when pretty much every returning pitcher is worse across the board.
The table below shows every Pirates pitcher on this year’s team that also threw at least 25 innings on last year’s team, as well as their ERA and FIP (fielding independent pitching) in each year. A red difference means they are worse.
That is a lot of red.
One or two guys getting worse is bad luck.
Three guys getting worse is annoying.
Nearly everybody getting worse is worthy of some serious questions.
It is easy to want to buy into them and believe in them because of the offense. They are in every game and can out-hit most teams. But we are now more than halfway through the season and they are still a .500 team that multiple games out of a playoff spot with several teams ahead of them. At some point they are going to need to start putting together a big winning streak, or a stretch where they win 10-out-of-14 or something similar. Given the upcoming schedule they have before the All-Star Break (it is brutal with Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta and Milwaukee all looming), as well as the current state of the pitching staff, it is really hard to see how that happens.
In some ways this season is even more frustrating than the ones where they just suck from the beginning with no hope. This just feels like a tease.
It is hotter than balls outside right now and the heat wave actually triggered a core childhood memory for me.
I don’t know WHY I have this memory, but I vividly remember being somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 or 12 years old and a similar heatwave rolling through in the summer. It was during that summer (and probably a few summers in that age range) that I would play pick-up baseball games in an empty lot with several kids in the area, and they were games that would go on for HOURS.
We played with tennis balls and aluminum bats, which created some hilariously far hits for our age range.
This particular heat wave was so bad that my mom said something along the lines of, “it’s too damn hot to be running around outside, I’m taking you to blockbuster and you’re renting some video games.”
I remember getting World Series Baseball 95 for Sega Genesis, and I remember playing that game for what seemed to be 36 hours straight. I not only stayed inside that entire week, I don’t think I ever left the TV. It was probably the appeal of being told, “yes, it’s okay to sit inside and play video games all day.”
That memory then sent me down a rabbit hole of my favorite baseball video games, with World Series 95 being near the top of the list.
The graphics at the time were mind-blowing. It had the actual stadiums. It had the actual rosters. It kept track of your stats throughout a season. When you hit a home run, you could taunt the opposing team by doing cartwheels around the bases and swinging your cap around.
Incredible game.
My other shortlist of favorite baseball games includes (and this not meant to be a ranking of the best games; just the games I personally enjoyed for one reason or another)…
Bases Loaded. Just an iconic game for the original Nintendo. It didn’t have real teams. It didn’t have real players. But it had legends. None bigger than Paste, the iconic No. 3 hitter for Jersey. The 1-5 in the Jersey lineup of Ryder, Becker, Paste, Bay and Ford was a video game version of the 1927 New York Yankees Murderer’s Row.
It also had that ear-worm song that played throughout.
What I especially loved about this game was the little things.
If you struck out with the bases loaded, the umpire would say, “You bum! Out!”
Every team also had one player in its lineup where if you would hit them with a pitch, it would prompt the hitter to charge the mind, get into a fight, and get ejected from the game.
This was great if you were playing against the computer in a full season mode (which this game had! Which was unheard of for the time and the system).
This was also chaotic if you were playing against a person and had to deal with their frustration over losing their best player. I think I got punched in the arm at least once over this.
MVP Baseball ‘05. It was all about the franchise/dynasty mode. You could play for 120 seasons. You could edit/build stadiums. You had three minor league teams to draft and develop talent. You could set ticket and food prices. You were basically the owner of the team. Every hitter and pitcher had their real-life batting stance and pitching delivery. The only exception to this was the fact Barry Bonds would not give his name to the game and was instead turned into a generic white guy by the name of Jon Dowd.
Jon Dowd remains one of the best video game athletes ever.
I probably played more hours of this game than any other baseball game. The only one that ever came close was …
Triple Play 98. It wasn’t the best game. It had good, but not great graphics. It was glitchy in terms of saving it. But I loved the game play, and I loved the presentation, including the intro for every game at every stadium.
No love for backyard baseball??
Triple Play and MVP were awesome.