Cooperstown Dreams.

Good evening all! After a small hiatus it's time to continue reporting on Baseball Tour 2014. After Baltimore, I made the scenic 4 1/2 hour drive to Cooperstown. I wasn't sure what to expect when I got there, but it is about what you'd expect. It's a giant shrine to the way baseball is envisioned in the minds of old-timers everywhere, a bucolic slice of heaven, served up Field of Dreams style.

I love baseball. I love it so much it hurts, but I am unique among my friends in that sentiment. I love it so much that it makes me sad what is happening to it. By any measure baseball has gone from the most popular sport in America to the 3rd most popular. Today, with the 1st week of NFL starting, is a good day to make this point. Most people have gravitated to football and basketball, sports that have a clock, sports that offer instant gratification and high scoring. Most importantly, sports that change their rules every year to make their game more exciting to the fans and market their stars amazingly well.

Mike Trout might end up being one of the top 3 players to ever play the game, but most people outside of LA have never heard of him. Giancarlo Stanton is blossoming before my eyes, but not many others. In the NFL and NBA, players like this would be on soup cans and billboards everywhere before you knew it.

I'm not saying that I want baseball to become some mutant version of itself to cater to the lowest common denominator. There still needs to be a place in our society for a game without a clock, a game outside of time, something that once you start, you might not know exactly when it will finish. But in today's society where someone can order dinner in 5 minutes on a mobile device and have it delivered to their door, no one is going to spend 3 1/2 to 4 hours on a game that moves at a snail's pace. I hope the new commissioner is going to enforce the time limit on pitches, and limit the number of mound visits per inning and per game, but I fear that Rob Manfred is just Bud Selig Jr.

Baseball is not the Field of Dreams anymore. The people that play it are just like the rest of us. They make mistakes. Some of them might bet on the game. Some of them might take a couple of pills to get through their 20th game in 20 days. That doesn't make it ok, just like our mistakes aren't ok, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them or pillory the people that make them.

Baseball wasn't invented by Abner Doubleday, and Joe DiMaggio is in the past. It's time for the people that run baseball to move away from the past and march confidently into the future while still acknowledging the great players who got us to this point. Move the Hall of Fame to a major city so more inner city kids have access to it. Make the story about PED's more than just a tiny flimsy plaque hidden in a dim corner. Maybe if we shine a light on how wonderful this game is, and start growing a new diverse generation of fans, the sport I love won't go the way of horse racing and boxing.