The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

A football game in 1995 bore no resemblance to a football game from 1945. The greatest pro basketball player from the fifties, George Mikan, could not have made an NBA roster in the eighties. The physical and technical evolution of football and basketball had been so dramatic that the past wasn’t comparable with the present. That wasn’t true with baseball. Baseball had evolved less. The aesthetics and physiology were more similar than different, and it was not remotely unreasonable to suggest that the greatest player of all time was still an overweight alcoholic who’d retired in 1935. Part of what made baseball historically compelling was its ability to transcend time. The skills of hitting and pitching were static, frozen in amber. It was the rare game where statistics from the past were comparable with statistics from the present. And then Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs in one season. Brady Anderson was a center fielder who spent his best years with the Baltimore Orioles. He entered the league in 1988 as a scrappy, fleet-footed leadoff hitter; had he played in the fifties, they would have called him a “Punch and Judy.” During the first eight years of his career, he appeared in 945 games and hit a total of 72 home runs. His first great year was ’92, when he hit 21 home runs, stole 53 bases, and made the All-Star Game. But then, as a thirty-two-year-old in 1996, something distorted. Anderson became a power-hitting machine. Throughout all of the 1980s, not one player hit 5...