Welcome to Classic Baseball!

We're here to tie present to past, and create a global community of baseball fans

Even people who don’t know a bat from a ball, a slider from a curve, or a ball from a strike (like some umpires!) know that baseball is simply a game. To some of us, it is the greatest game.

And while other sports have captured the imagination of sports fans in the 77 years since the immortal Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth spoke his last public words to a packed Yankee Stadium crowd, baseball is still the one that so many of us consider their sports “home.” That said, as time continues forward, some of us look backward and think of the game we grew up with more fondly than ever before.

Me? I turned 60 years old not long ago. And that’s a time in life where many of us, men and women, US residents and those around the globe, start to really think about what our lives have been about. And, as importantly, what we want them to be in the time we have left…which we hope will be a very long time.

Big league ambitions

Photo by Nicole Green on Unsplash

For a group of us, including some former Major League baseball players, this site on the Substack platform, while very new, has some big-league aspirations. We want Classic Baseball to cover the human side of the game, its people and its culture, as they exist today. But at the same time, we want to connect today to the past. Not necessarily the distant past, because our aim is to cover some less-travelled baseball roads.

In fact, we’ll point out some of our favorite sites and sources for those who want to learn about the early history of the game, how it ties in with US and global progress, and how it changed our lives forever, and for the better, with the integration of African American, and then Latin American players into the game. It took much longer than it should have, and there are plenty of life lessons in that, too.

But our main focus is to honor, report on, and provide an online community for, those who, like us, were raised by baseball. Almost like an additional parent, it was there for us, helping us understand life, learn math (1 hit in four times at bat, that’s a .250 average!) and socialize with our friends. Not to mention, develop ties to people that can never be undone.

Classic Era: looking back, ahead, and living in the moment

We’re talking about the game as it was during the final 1/3 of the 20th century, so around 1967-1999. This overlaps with what Major League Baseball (MLB) now refers to as the “Classic Era” for considering new members of its Hall of Fame. For them this era was anything prior to 1980. For us, it is when many of grew up with the game, and became lifelong fans of the sport. Maybe we played through 5th grade, maybe in high school or college, or in the case of our MLB alumni, were paid to play at the highest level.

What we all have in common: the love of the game. Not simply the beauty of legging out a double because you and your first base coach recognized that the left fielder had to turn just far enough to his right on the single you hit to be able to recover, and thus you’d beat the throw to second.

No, this is about the total package: the game, the atmosphere, the friendships, the arguments (we miss you, Earl Weaver) the generational/family ties, the language of the game and so much more. And, we’ll include in our coverage the exciting expansion of the game well beyond US borders. That includes on the continent of Africa, where several of us are working to literally pave a path to allow thousands of kids in that part of the world to make the game part of their lives. They show us every day just how ready they are for that.

Everyone in this community enjoys many sports. But to us, as the Bambino famously said, there’s only one real game. Baseball. And we exist to build a community around that.

Welcome to our community!

Best regards,

Rob Isbitts

Founder, Classic Baseball