How game has changed in 68 years: since 1942, baseball has undergone major alterations from breaking down color barriers-to expansion-to free agency-to enlarged playoff system - Statistical Data Included - Illustration

Baseball Digest, Feb, 2002 by George Vass

DESPITE THE HOARY PROVERB, HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF BUT SOMEtimes the similarities are so startling as to lend credence to a popular fallacy.

Sixty years ago when sportswriter Herbert Simons founded BASEBALL DIGEST, which is now the sport's only monthly magazine, patriotic fervor was sweeping the United States in the aftermath of a sneak attack by an enemy. In 1942, as in the year 2002, the drums of war were reverberating and a president was urging Americans to steel themselves for an arduous campaign to smash the nation's foes.

Yet, George W. Bush in 2002 does not face the kind of adversaries and challenges following the attack on New York City's World Trade Center that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt six decades earlier after the Pearl Harbor bombing. It's a much changed world. The gulf of time dividing the "War on Terrorism" and World War II is almost as great as the one between the latter and the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s.

America in the early 21st Century is far different in countless ways from what it was like in the first half of the 20th. Among other things, it's more than twice as populous with more than 285 million inhabitants as compared to 130 million. That multitude is also more culturally diverse given the vast influx of immigrants from lands that formerly sent few people to the United States.

Just as the nation has changed so has major league baseball in many ways whose cumulative effect almost escapes notice because modifications and alterations came singly not in battalions. The game has gone through a gradual evolution rather than a revolution but the over-all change has been major.

In fact, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that the "national pastime" is a whole new ballgame compared to what it was like in 1942.

That may wound the sensibilities of those so entranced by nostalgia and a romantic view of the game's mythology as to contend baseball is immutable. But to insist that Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and Randy Johnson are playing the same game as their great predecessors of the 1940s, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Mort Cooper and the rest, is sheer self-delusion.

Admitting to change doesn't require a value judgment, of course, as to whether baseball was better or worse in 1942 than it is today. There's no need to echo Hall of Famer Cap Anson's disdain for the way the game was being played two decades after he retired as Chicago Colts (Cubs) manager and first baseman in 1897.

"Baseball was a man's game in my day," Anson sniffed, sneering at "modern" changes in the sport in the 1910s. "I'd like to see what today's boys would do against the likes of (Old Hoss) Radbourn, (Pud) Galvin, (Tim) Keefe and (John) Clarkson. I'd like to see (Ty) Cobb and (Joe) Jackson and (Babe) Ruth hit against them ... why they probably wouldn't bat .350 between them."

Comparisons of relative merit aside, whether between baseball in 1942 and 2002 or that of Anson's day in the late 19th Century and the early 20th, what's indisputable is that the game never stands still, that change is not only unavoidable but sometimes even beneficial.

Here's a baker's dozen (13) ways in which baseball differed from today's game when Simon, a noted Chicago Daily Times baseball writer, put out the first issue of BASEBALL DIGEST in August 1942.

1 The reserve clause bound players to their teams indefinitely with no right to dispose of their own services. They had almost as little recourse as slaves did in pre-Civil War days. Free agency was a distant dream, if that. The owners treated their serfs as if they were a commodity like pork bellies.

2 African-American players were barred from what was considered organized baseball, Latin Americans were a rarity and there were none from the Far East. The Negro leagues were the only stage on which many outstanding African-American players such as pitcher Satchel Paige and slugger Josh Gibson could demonstrate their skills.

3 There were only 16 major league teams, eight in the National League and eight in the American League, just over half as many as there are today. Only 10 cities had big league teams. Stability was the order of the day, with no changes in teams or cities since 1903. The only teams west of the Mississippi River--just barely--were the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Browns.

4 Night baseball was still on trial though the Reds and Philadelphia Phillies had played the first major league game under the lights at Cincinnati's Crosley Field on May 24, 1935. Despite a common misconception the Cubs were not the only team to resist putting in lights, though they held out by far the longest, until 1988.

5 Of the major league parks in use in 1942, the only current survivors are the Cubs' Wrigley Field, the Boston Red Sox's Fenway Park and New York's Yankee Stadium. More than a dozen other stadia have been replaced, some more than once, between 1942 and 2002.

6 The Designated Hitter Rule, though first suggested in the 1920s, was still three decades away, not being adopted by the American League until 1972. Pitchers in both leagues generally hit for themselves and some, such as Red Ruffing of the Yankees and Jim Tobin of the Boston Braves, were noted for their ability with the bat, even being used as pinch hitters.