Love Quote by Mike Piazza

Piazza is pitching nostalgia, but it is nostalgia with an agenda. When he says he longs for the days athletes were "revered", he is really mourning the collapse of a protective bubble: the era when fans and media treated stars as mythic figures rather than highly paid workers, brand partners, and sometimes political actors. "Romance" here is code for innocence - not just of the game, but of the relationship between audience and athlete, when devotion didn’t come with constant scrutiny, hot-take churn, or a demand that players be morally legible 24/7.

The line works because it frames a very modern discomfort as a yearning for purity. "Enjoy the game purely for the game" is less a description of how sports ever truly functioned and more a critique of what sports have become: an always-on content machine where gambling odds, legacy debates, and social-media outrage can matter as much as the box score. Piazza, a superstar who played at the hinge between old media and the digital era, is speaking from that transitional vantage point. In the 1990s, athletes were becoming global commodities, but the fan experience was still largely local and slower; today, every slump is a meme, every contract a moral referendum.

The subtext is also defensive: reverence is safety. It’s a plea to separate performance from person, and to let fandom be uncomplicated again. Of course, that simplicity was never evenly distributed; many athletes were policed or politicized long before Twitter. Piazza’s wish isn’t naive, exactly - it’s a bid to restore a kind of selective grace that modern sports culture is increasingly unwilling to grant.