Daily Inspiration Quote by John Thorn

Panic is a tradition as old as the pastime itself, and Thorn’s line is a neat pinprick to that balloon. By dropping us into “the seventies” with “much woe and lamentation,” he’s not just reporting a mood; he’s cataloging a recurring cultural reflex: when a sport stops feeling like the version people fell in love with, the first diagnosis is always terminal. The phrasing matters. “Woe” and “lamentation” sound faintly biblical, deliberately overwrought, a historian’s way of underlining how melodramatic these death notices tend to be.

The intent is corrective, almost archival. Thorn, baseball’s most prominent steward of its long memory, is reminding readers that “baseball is dying” isn’t a prophecy so much as a genre. The 1970s were a particularly fertile decade for that genre: post-expansion identity shifts, labor wars and free agency jolting the old moral economy, the aftershock of the ’68 pitching year and rule tweaks, changing TV rhythms, changing cities, changing fans. If you were attached to a pastoral, orderly baseball, the new version looked like corruption. If you were watching from the cheap seats, it looked like your game was being renegotiated without you.

Subtext: the real subject isn’t baseball’s health, it’s cultural ownership. When people declare the game “dying,” they’re often mourning the loss of their authority to define it. Thorn’s dry backward glance quietly proposes a tougher truth: sports don’t die from change; they die from refusing to admit they’ve always been changing.