If you've just about had your fill of politicians lying to you on various fronts, it probably won't come as good news that Major League Baseball has been pulling the wool over your eyes for decades as well. In other words, you been conned.
Right now the annual Home Run Derby is taking place on the eve of the All-Star Game. That's great. See the sluggers hitting ball after ball of batting practice pitches into the seats. Quite the show for those so inclined.
But also see the deception that continues to be perpetrated upon you.
These days, the announcers will come up with all sorts of superlatives. "Moon" or "monster" shot for any ball traveling over 400 feet. Over 440 will get them hyperventilating. What comes after moon or monster? It simply isn't so. Never has been.
In days of old, Tiger stadium's center field wall was 440 feet from home plate. A fly ball hit, say, 420, wasn't a moon shot. Not even a home run. Just a long out.
The old Yankee Stadium featured a whopping distance of 465 feet from home plate. The longest home run hit to date this year wouldn't been a home run if hit in that direction back in the day. Maybe an out, or maybe a double, if the left or center fielder couldn't catch up to it. But definitely not a home run.
Here's a question. How come no Major League player in recent years seems capable of hitting a ball 500 feet or more? What would the announcers call that? A deep space probe?
After all, back in the 1960s, a chubby little first baseman named Norm Cash of the Detroit Tigers supposedly hit several balls well over 500 feet. Clean out of Tiger Stadium over the right field wall. And he wasn't the only one. Several other players around the league did the same in those times.
Nowadays, players have custom made bats, the balls themselves are supposedly "juiced", the pitchers are throwing as hard as ever, maybe harder, and still no 500 foot home runs. How can that be?
Back in 1971, Reggie Jackson hit a ball high into the light tower in right center field of the same Tiger Stadium. If Cash's homers were somewhere around 500-525 feet, as advertised at the time, surely that one had to be at least 550, or more.
Legend has it that the longer homer ever hit belonged to one Mickey Mantle. Some 585 feet. If that were done today, the same announcers would faint dead away. But that's not going to happen.
Why? Because nowadays sophisticated technology exists to determine, within a foot or so, exactly how long any home run actually is. Much like the yardage on any PGA golf hole is lasered and computed from all angles and distances.
Bottom line? Either the pudgy, partying players of old -- with their comparatively primitive equipment (bats) -- were a whole lot stronger than the modern day players, or we were fed a bunch of grossly exaggerated hogwash back in the day -- and bought it.
Chubby little Norm Cash hit balls more further than Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, even Barry Bonds?
It made for great fairy tales once upon a time, and was fun to believe. So was Sleeping Beauty, Jack and his beanstalk, and why do you think Don Quixote is the best-selling novel of all time? The masses ate up the idea of tilting at windmills.
Yet it can safely be said they were just that -- fairy tales -- as in pure fiction.
And so were the "monster" home run lengths in days of old.
They were nothing but grabbing an arbitrary (outrageous) number out of the air and declaring it to be true.
Nice stories, but in the end, lies.
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