Rewriting America’s Pastime
“The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time,” a quote from the “Field of Dreams”.
Major League Baseball was not only America’s Pastime, but it was America’s sport. It was America’s most popular game.
For me, baseball is more than just a game. It is a way of life, a way of understanding who you are and what life is like. With so many rules and so many highs and lows, baseball is much more than just a three-hour activity of men hitting a ball with a wooden bat.
Baseball has lost its popularity and needs to get it back.
This newsletter is about using journalism and writing to make the game as popular and known as it should be. A non-bias source who reporters on all teams, all games, all players. By using other beat writers’ articles to spread the news about each team’s game, fans can learn about the successes and failures of opposing teams, so they are focused on more than just one team. They can also learn about how baseball is a game and so much more.
Furthermore, I will use highlights and videos of games and plays in the articles, so fans do not have to just read about the games from their biased news reporter. “Rewriting America’s Pastime” will be used to grow the game, through potential ideas and viewpoints from someone in the generation that MLB is trying to attract: Generation Z.
My name is Sandler Douglas. I am a die-hard baseball fan, particularly of the Oakland Athletics. I know who won every day and how everyone played, throughout the game daily. I know extremely random trivia and spent my entire childhood playing and watching the game, learning facts and stats about its history. Furthermore, I have attended Opening Day and Spring Training every year of my life, including 550 MLB games.
While the 2021 season is over, so much happens during the off-season that it is a great time to talk about and learn about the game. Over the next few months, I will be talking about how to make the game more popular, going over weekly techniques and tricks to grow the game, including expanding on certain aspects of the game and what the game could do to make it stronger and more popular.
For my next column, I will be responding to a New York Times article titled “Baseball, Popular but No Longer Dominant, Seeks to Reclaim Its Cool” about the different ways MLB is trying to grow the game.
I will write columns that recap daily changes during the off-season in preparation for the 2022 season. This is an opportunity for me to incorporate my personality and opinions when talking about the news surrounding the off-season.
I will also focus on what new changes MLB should implement in the regular season including the controversial universal designated hitter argument, automated strike zones, and so much more.
A hot topic today that I believe would be a really interesting column and will help grow the game is expansion. With only 30 teams in MLB and only 17 states representing teams, adding more teams across North America would greatly improve the popularity of MLB.
Finally, another column idea I had is about how Major League Baseball can use social media and technology more to its advantage, using platforms like House of Highlights and Bleacher Report to grow the game to Generation Z.
Each week is a new topic, all with one major goal in common. There are nine men on the field for a team at all times, but it may just take one man’s article to Rewrite America’s Pastime.
