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January 18, 2007

Schrodinger's Bat

The Myth of the Golden Age

by Dan Fox

The golden age was first; when Man yet new,
No rule but uncorrupted reason knew:
And, with a native bent, did good pursue.
Unforc'd by punishment, un-aw'd by fear...

- Ovid, from his Metamorphoses (AD 8)

Throughout much of history humans have looked back on the remote past as a time of peace and plenty. As in the Roman poet Ovid's verse above, containing ideas that can be traced directly back to Hesiod writing in the late 8th and early 7th centuries BC, peace and harmony prevailed during this Golden Age, when the remote ancestors of the Greeks never aged and the earth brought forth food without effort.

That basic idea is repeated around the world. From the "First Time" of Osiris when abundance characterized the now-dry Egyptian landscape, to the "Reign of Saturn" when Jupiter's father ruled Italy, to the days when Krishna walked in India, to the rule of Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha in the Aztec, Mayan and Incan domains, and finally to our more familiar Garden of Eden.

It is only much more recently that humanity, aided in no small part by the Enlightenment and the insight of biological evolution, has adopted a more or less linear view of history that poses its own dangers. Under this view the future is generally bright and the lives of our ancestors are often viewed as "nasty, brutish, and short," a view C.S. Lewis labeled "chronological snobbery" when used to characterize more recent generations.

But be that as it may, the myth of the golden age in baseball has proven harder to shake. From Ty Cobb to Ted Williams to Joe Morgan (but notably not Casey Stengel), both the players and those who write about the game hearken back to the good old days when players were smarter, the level of play supposedly better with an emphasis on fundamentals, and when giants like Ruth, Johnson, and Lou Gehrig "roamed the earth," as the book of Genesis says. Williams himself summed up the view nicely in 1992: