Time & Perspective Quote by Ernie Banks

Banks is doing more than reminiscing about “the good old days” of baseball; he’s giving you a neat X-ray of how modern sports turn individual greatness into system performance. The line starts with a gentle flex of authority: “During my time” isn’t just a timestamp, it’s a credential. But he immediately undercuts nostalgia by conceding a hard truth: today’s teams are built differently, and often better equipped to win.

The specifics matter. “One pitcher or two” evokes an era when stars carried outsized workloads and the narrative logic of a season was simpler: ace dominates, team survives. When Banks notes that winners “maybe had three,” he’s describing depth as a rare luxury rather than a baseline expectation. Then comes the pivot: “today they have a lot of depth.” That repetition of “a lot” does real work, signaling not just more arms, but a different worldview - redundancy, specialization, and risk management.

The mention of “long relievers, short relievers” lands like a mini inventory of modern labor roles. It’s baseball’s version of corporate org charts: narrower job descriptions, tighter optimization, less room for improvisational heroism. The subtext is ambivalent. Banks admires the sophistication, but you can hear a faint elegy for the romance of endurance - the starter who goes the distance, the story you can tell in one sentence.

Contextually, it’s also a quiet comment on money, analytics, and injury science reshaping the sport. “Strategy is different” is Banks’s understated way of saying the game’s values have changed: from trust in a few to leverage everywhere.