How Nostalgia Fucks with Your Memory

Baseball Buddha Mid-Season Rant!

I remember baseball from the inside of a 12-year-old brain. It felt perfect. The sound of the ball hitting the glove, the way the uniforms fit, the way the sun hit the grass in a stadium. I didn’t know shit about what was actually happening behind the scenes, but it didn’t matter. I loved the game with my whole heart. I thought the players were legends. Heroes. Gods. The ones who didn’t make errors. The ones who signed your program with a wink and jogged off into eternity.

Turns out, that was bullshit.

The 1970s and '80s were my Golden Age. But as I got older and started paying attention, I realized that the Golden Age was caked in shit. Nostalgia does that to you. It sanitizes the mess. It hands you highlight reels and filters out the cocaine, the domestic violence, the racism, the broken kids from Latin America getting chewed up by the system.

What the fuck were we all watching?

We were watching Keith Hernandez snort coke and then pretend to be a role model. We were watching Steve Howe get suspended seven times for drug abuse and still get brought back because he could throw heat. We were watching Tim Raines slide headfirst to protect a vial of cocaine in his back pocket. We were cheering.

Nostalgia is a liar.

But here’s the thing, I still love all of it.

Because for every time nostalgia feeds us a half-truth, it also hands us a memory worth keeping. I still laugh my ass off at the Dock Ellis LSD no-hitter. It sounds made up. It feels like a Hunter S. Thompson fever dream. But it fucking happened. I mean, who else but Dock could say, "I can only pitch if I'm high" and then go out and throw a no-hitter?

And Pete Rose? That dude was a knucklehead of the highest order. A gambler, a bullheaded asshole, and possibly the last of the truly unfiltered legends. But goddamn, he played the game like his hair was on fire. I dove headfirst into second base for no reason other than Pete did it. I knew even back then he wasn’t perfect but that was the point. He was the game, warts and all.

The 1970s style? Come on. The collars, the cords, the shades, the mustaches that could stop traffic. It was chaotic fashion with swagger, and baseball wore it well. Who didn’t love the A’s unis? Kelly green, banana yellow, white cleats, looked like a softball team and played like gangsters. But beyond the threads, the players themselves just looked like guys, rough around the edges, unfiltered, real. Not like today’s carefully sculpted brand ambassadors, but more like the guy who might fix your carburetor and then go 3-for-4 with a hangover.

So yeah, I get it. I get why we cling to nostalgia. It feels good. It makes things simple. It paints the game in golden tones and edits out the shadows.

But I don’t want simple. I want the whole damn picture.

Because here’s the truth:

The game was a fucking mess. But it wasn’t separate from the world, it was the world. The '70s and '80s were gritty, chaotic, off-script. Baseball just mirrored the culture. Players were wild because the world was wild. Nobody was polished. Nobody had media training. There was no personal brand to protect. Guys had mustaches and opinions and made mistakes in full view. The game wasn’t curated. It just was.

And now? Now we live in the edited era. Everything’s a PR statement. Everyone says the right thing. The jerseys are tighter, the haircuts cleaner, the postgame interviews more robotic. The mess is still there; it just hides better. Everyone’s polished as hell, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. It just means the dirt’s harder to see.

That’s what makes nostalgia dangerous. We think it was pure back then because today feels fake. But neither version is true. Then was messy and alive. Now is polished and distant. In both, the game reflects the times.

Players were doing lines in the bathroom. Some were violent at home. Some were racist as hell. Some were just broken, addicted, angry, chewed up by the machine and spit out. And the league? It let them be all of that. As long as they could play. As long as asses stayed in the seats.

Steve Howe was suspended seven times for drugs and kept getting brought back. Seven. Fucking. Times. If he was a fringe guy, he’d have been gone after one. But he could throw heat, and that’s all that mattered.

And let’s not forget the minor leaguers grinding it out for next to nothing, or the kids in the Dominican taking steroids before they could drive. We romanticize the pipeline, the grit, the dream. But the dream was rigged. The dream was cruel.

And then there was Hank Aaron, chasing down Babe Ruth’s record with a bodyguard and a pile of hate mail. The country wanted to celebrate the moment, but a big chunk of it also wanted him dead. That’s not ancient history. That was during my Golden Age.

Meanwhile, the media pretended none of it existed. Writers knew who was using, who was violent, who was falling apart. They kept quiet. Protect the game. Protect the myth. Sell the legend.

And I bought it. I bought every pack of cards. Every Baseball Digest. Every dumb, sanitized story.

But I know better now. And I still fucking love it.

Because baseball was never pure. It was never supposed to be. What it was and still is, if you’re paying attention is real. Messy. Flawed. Human. It's not the feel-good nostalgia trip the league tries to package now. It's a complicated, contradiction-filled, glorious mess. And that’s why I keep coming back.

I still remember Reggie hitting three bombs in one night and thinking he was Superman. I still remember the sound of a game on the radio with the windows down and the smell of summer in the air. I still remember flipping through a wax pack, hoping for a good card and getting stuck with a checklist and gum that tasted like drywall. And I love every single bit of it.

But I also remember what got left out.

So here it is. This is my mid-season report.

The game remembers what it wants to. But I remember it all. The glory. The grime. The truth. The whole fucked-up, beautiful thing.