In a comment, Feryl said he saw a chart about how NFL players started getting heavier and heavier circa the 1970s, linking it to the status-striving and inequality trend.
After some googling, I found this post with a series of graphs showing the evolution of body size among NFL players from 1950 to present. Most of the change has occurred since the '70s, and players on the whole tended to be similar in height and weight during the '50s and '60s, with slow decelerating growth at most. That's important for showing that this is not just some long-term trend that goes back to the very beginning of the sport, but one that began at the same time that competitiveness in general became glorified throughout society.
Some positions have gotten taller, but most show modest or no change in height. The real change has been in weight, particularly where the sumo wrestling takes place, among centers, tackles, guards, and linebackers. They appear to have gotten a full two standard deviations heavier, and even a good deal of the other positions have gotten about one standard deviation heavier. That is a huge change in less than two generations.
An offensive and defensive lineman who both weigh 200 lbs will have the same balance of forces as a pair who are both 300 lbs -- evenly matched. But somewhere along the way, some "greed is good" coach decided to put slightly heavier linemen up against the prevailing standard-weight linemen, giving his own a slight edge. Everyone else quickly caught on and imitated the strategy, the initial edge was eroded, and all were suddenly caught up in an escalating arms race toward 300-pound linemen.
Although the balance of forces is the same with a pair of 200-pound linemen and a pair of 300-pound linemen, the variance is not. Imagine a lighter pair engaged in an evenly matched tug-of-war, when someone cuts the rope and both fall backward. Now imagine two giants lumbering around when thrown off-balance. Or imagine the force of impact when the evenly matched lighter pair vs. heavier pair slam into each other.
Introducing a simple weight regulation to prevent a pointless arms
race that endangers the players will not be enacted until the social mood changes away from sanctifying competition. For now, it would only enrage the braindead fans whose sole meaning in life is to
squabble over whose squad of transplant gorillas-for-hire is more vicious.
Back when sports fans were not bloodsport junkies, and sports players were not
outsider mercenary apes, this wasn't a problem. But now that
competition for its own sake has reached sacrosanct status, who are we
to get in the way of more and more ridiculous, bombastic
bread-and-circus entertainment?
And it won't be the fans who have to pay the costs of the arms race --
they're not the ones taking all those hits from 300-pound hulks.
Fortunately for the game, the players aren't exactly known for their
future orientation, and don't mind fucking themselves up for big money
today, at the cost of living as a cripple for the rest of their lives.
The coaches only want to win, and the NFL only wants advertising dollars
hence eyeballs and butts in seats. With no checks anywhere throughout
the entire football ecosystem, the whole place is headed to hell in a
handbasket.
Sadly, a sector that cannot police itself, and that is becoming ever more bombastic and economically parasitic on ordinary folks, means that only people from outside the pro sports ecosystem can do anything about it. Not shut it down, but dial it back by regulations to where it was in the Midcentury.
That would have sounded like a pipe dream in the '90s, when the two sports-crazy generations -- Silents and Boomers -- were dominant. But sooner rather than later, they'll either be retired, senile, or dead, and the average member of Gen X and Millennials could give a shit about the barbaric religion of gladiator worship (UFC fandom still being a very niche identity). I can't think of too many causes that would so effortlessly unite X-ers and Millennials of all political persuasions. Beating the money-changers out of the athletic temple is one of them.
Um, no. It's steroids.
ReplyDeletesperrrg
ReplyDelete'Or imagine the force of impact when the evenly matched lighter pair vs. heavier pair slam into each other.'
ReplyDeleteThat's something I meant to get at but forgot to mention. It figures that coaches/the media play dumb about why serious injuries have become much more common since the 80's. As usual, the Boomers who initiated and/or accelerated such abhorrent trends won't take responsibility for the damage they've done. I've also noticed that many fans (including younger fans) adopt a libertarian style 'they knew what they were getting into' attitude to let society off the hook for encouraging barbaric trends.
Oh, and the blame steroids guy is missing the point. In a highly competitive climate, strivers in any given station of life, athlete or whatever will resort to doing anything imaginable to get ahead. Steroids themselves don't cause grotesque obesity; eating excessively and deliberately avoiding behaviors that limit weight gain to stay competitive in football are the main reason for such huge weights.
As long as were on football, what does any one make of football becoming significantly more black since the mid 80's? I think it's because of guilt ridden late silents/Boomers fawning over blacks (gotta give blacks credit/opportunities somewhere) while Gen X/Millenial white youth have been frightened away from sports involving large aggressive blacks. Mainly football but also basketball. Gen X parents in particular remember a youth filled with dangerous blacks so they are probably steering their kids away from blacker sports.
It was easier for Silents/Boomers to develop intense sports interest in the 50's-70's when players were whiter, better sportsman and more physically ordinary.
In the NHL, there finally is some talk about reducing thuggish violence, probably because post Boomer players and fans are not as enthusiastic about unnecessary bloodshed.
Quintessential Boomer Jimmy Johnson (1943 birth), the Dallas Cowboys/later Dolphins coach took the football world by storm when he won several Super Bowls in the early to mid 90's with a roster that was substantially blacker than most 70's/80's rosters. The whiter Buffalo Bills infamously lost 4 straight Super Bowl in the 90's. That furthered spurred coaches and scouts to favor black players. At the same time white athletes were starting to lose interest in playing a sport with belligerent trash talking blacks that were a product of 1970's/1980's ghetto hellholes.
ReplyDeleteI think that whites got along better with blacks raised before the 70's.Generational environment effects do seem to vary by race.
If Gen-Xers and Millennials were turned off by gladiatorial sports you'd expect that baseball, especially in the post-steroids era, would have a younger viewership.
ReplyDeleteThe opposite is the case - baseball skews older than the other major sports. The median age for World Series viewership is in the 50's.
If football and basketball have a younger viewership than baseball, and they do, then I don't know how you can make the claim that young folks today are turned off by brutal, hyper-competitive sports.
A 1943 birth would be a late Silent, still part of the Me Generation though.
ReplyDeleteWhy have blacks flooded sports since the status-striving phase began? I think a sorely overlooked factor is their behavioral differences, not just physical. The Silent / Boomer way to analyze it is to point out racial differences in body type, muscle type, and so on. Being sports fans, they pay attention to the athletic dimension the most.
But blacks are also a lot more uncontrolled. That's what you want in a gladiator sport -- no self-regulation, which would get in the way of WINNING. Sportsmanship naturally evaporates when winning is the only thing, backed by the norm of laissez-faire. And who are less behaviorally and emotionally regulated than blacks?
Silent/Boomer race realists want to maintain a positive spin on racial differences in sports. Hey, blacks are just physically better adapted to certain positions in certain sports -- that's a good thing! Having a more cynical view of pro sports, the Gen X and Millennial observers are more likely to point out blacks' behavioral advantages for gladiator sports, such as acting like uncontrollable thugs. Not such a positive spin on racial differences.
"If football and basketball have a younger viewership than baseball, and they do, then I don't know how you can make the claim that young folks today are turned off by brutal, hyper-competitive sports."
ReplyDeleteConfused attempt to use logic rather than observation. You're looking at age effects, when I outlined cohort effects.
Younger people have shorter attention spans than older people, and crave more moment-to-moment change and excitement in their entertainment. That creates the ranking of sports by age, with the constant back-and-forth of basketball being the youngest, then football, then baseball where almost nothing happens, then golf where nothing ever happens.
Then look at trends over time. Sports fans as a whole keep getting older, including football. This is a result of Silents and Boomers hanging on to gladiator obsession more than they should for their middle/old age lifestyles, and Gen X and Millennials not taking them up with the rabid enthusiasm that you would've predicted young potential viewers to have, based on what the Boomers were like at young ages.
Steroids are a concern, and a sign of the unregulated climate we live in now, but it's missing the bigger picture to focus on steroids / HGH as the sole corrupter of fair play.
ReplyDeleteIt's no less certain that the tackles and guards who weigh over 300 lbs are not naturally that way. Steroids gives you better results when you lift, but you have to eat a whole shit load of food to pack on that much fat. Not like those guys are shredded Incredible Hulk types. They've loaded up on carbs to store fat, plus a lot of fat to be stored. Just like sumo wrestlers carb-loading.
There is absolutely nothing natural about that physical state. Even compared to the average lardass American who weighs 195 lbs, a 315-pound lineman is still 4 to 5 standard deviations out into the tail.
Just because they took a less flagrant artificial path toward becoming a freak in order to win, doesn't mean it isn't gaming the system.
But even if they got that way purely naturally, why allow it to take place, let alone encourage, fund, and shower attention on sumo wrestling between 300-pound gorillas-for-hire?
That's the crux of the difference between the libertarian Silent/Boomer approach and the Gen X / Millennial approach. Silents and Boomers only get upset when they feel that the rules are not being applied equally, or if the most flagrant kind of physical corruption is taking place, like shooting up a pint of steroids.
As long as a consistently applied set of rules has produced the current state of pro sports, it doesn't matter that this has turned it into a bread-and-circus gladiator bloodsport, with dark-skinned thugs as the object of hero worship for the flabby pasty couch potatoes rooting them on at home.
The posts on generational differences in attitudes toward taxation and unions show Gen X and Millennials moving toward the other pole, where the end-result is what matters, not how the world got there. Which processes "follow the rules," as opposed to bending or breaking them, is in practice a distraction and smokescreen because rules are social constructs, reflecting the interests of the dominant groups in society.
Just look at legal vs. illegal immigration -- who cares if your formerly all-American town gets swallowed up by 50% Mexicans, as long as it was all approved by some bureaucracy's rules!
The conservative view is that destabilizing outcomes are bad, and it doesn't matter how they got that way, or whether we'll have to re-write the rules to contain them back into a stable state. What brought us into such a fucked-up state of affairs were just man-made rules, not God-given commandments or time-tested conventions.
'Kill the head and it dies'.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhnn9kbqQUA
I can't imagine why more conscientious people are reluctant to play football. By the way, the psycho in the audio (Gregg Williams, '58 birth) is still coaching in the NFL.
Watching older games on Youtube, players were not only more ordinary looking in the 70's (to a lesser degree, the 80's also) but there was more of an obvious, sincere bond between the players (both within and even between teams) and there was also a lot less clown look at me showboating after plays. I think it was easier to develop close, affectionate relationships in the high trust 80's in spite of rising inequality. On the other hand, watching Detroit's '91 playoff win there's definitely signs of the coming thugiffication of contact sports. The roster's have gotten bigger and blacker and there's more in your face celebrating. Still, it's mild compared to the narcissistic freakshow you see nowadays.
Announcers were also more matter of fact/stoic and less emo into the 80's. Of course, we all remember how EXTREME (i.e. camp/hysterical/tasteless) everything started becoming in the 90's.
Baseball has gotten even more dull due to roided up hulks who lack speed and agility becoming more common. Though with ramped up testing a few years ago it isn't as bad now as it was in the 90's/ 2000's. It's also gotten more dull because of modern OCD tendencies of pitchers and batters to go through elaborate rituals & ruminating. Get in the damn box and throw the pitch already.
I also came close to mentioning behavioral differences earlier in terms of selecting for blacks in a competitive climate. Thanks for going there for me. I also think that among the white players, the swarthier ones seem to be more common on defense. Meanwhile, most white quarterbacks have green or blue eyes. I remember reading something a while back about how introverted light eyed whites seem to excel at tasks requiring precision and marksmanship while less inhibited brown eyed whites have an advantage at quickly reacting to other people's movements.
Silent isn't exactly an accurate way to describe the blustery Jimmy Johnson. In a more extreme era his personality is going to be an asset. Contrast him with the dignified gentleman that Tom Landry ( Cowboys coach from '60- '88) was.
ReplyDeleteJohnson's successor Barry Switzer (b. 1937) is an even bigger blowhard who recently made the news for saying he no longer believes in starting white quarterbacks. So much for silence. Switzer resigned as Oklahoma coach in disgrace in the late 80's after a series of scandals. The last straw was a player selling coke to undercover FBI agents.
Other signs of the NFL going from humble to bombastic during the '80s and after:
ReplyDeleteSuper Bowl national anthem was no longer played by a marching band or sung by a children's choir, but by a contempo pop culture phenomenon. Began in 1980 with Cheryl Ladd from Charlie's Angels. Since then, only '85 had a boys and girls' chorus.
Super Bowl halftime show features pop culture stars in '87, although marching bands are still present as well. But by '92, marching bands are gone, and from then on it's all about the mega-stars.
Super Bowl ads have only became an obsession since the '90s:
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2013/02/when-did-super-bowl-become-about.html
Without the goatee, Gregg Williams looks like a lardass lesbian with bitch tits. He's never been player, so coaching is some kind of paraphilia for him -- climaxing every time two sweaty negroes slam into each other, at his direction.
ReplyDeleteFor the audience in general, football has become some kind of virtual reality drug where they get their kicks experiencing what it's like to be a black rapist-murderer.
And these are the parents who worry about their children playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. "Where did you get this bloodsport stuff?" "You, all right! I learned it by watching you!"
'Without the goatee, Gregg Williams looks like a lardass lesbian with bitch tits.'
ReplyDeleteI didn't want go 'there' (picking on people's superficial shortcomings) but why not with this kind of jerkoff.
With regard to violent media, late Boomers and Gen X-ers sure loved Predator, Rambo , Doom etc. Still, they didn't then and they don't now show much interest in perpetrating real life carnage aside from the occasional frustrated mass murder rampage. The Silents and early Boomers grew up with mostly sanitized entertainment (including civilized sports) but that didn't stop them from inflicting lots of calculated damage on many people since the later 60's.
Gen X/Millenials seem to avoid hurting others unless they happen to be very angry or crazy while Silents/Boomers have more mentally stable type people who will calculate schemes and rituals for taking advantage of others. When Silents/Boomers are total nutters they are more likely to be sadistic and sexually motivated then Gen X/Millenials.
I have young kids, and I myself was not an athlete (though, as an adult, I'm in good shape and even, in some sense, 'athletic').
ReplyDeleteAs my kids approach school age, I wonder why I would ever put them in public schools (junior high and high schools). Public schools are really the incubators and creators of our celebrity culture (and, specific to this thread, to our fawning over football and football players).
Which is a good thing-if you are in the top 10% of football players (a few schools may be basketball focussed, or even baseball). But for everyone else, school is just prolonged training for an artificial pecking order, in which they are on the bottom. Think about the whole concept of a pep rally: one group of guys' hobby (which happens to be football rather than swimming, or chess, or gardening, or wrestling, volleyball, or any other) is sanctioned to the point that every member of that society is obligated to spend time idolizing them.
Think about it as an adult: if you were single, and wanted to find someone for a relationship or even friendship: would you go hang out in a sports bar habituated by former professional athletes (assuming you aren't a former professional athlete)? Of course not: that would be the most unhealthy and unproductive thing you could possibly do.
Yet we put 90% of our kids into high schools where they are obligated to do just that (the other 10% are the ones that really benefit-the athletes themselves). And we do it during what is essentially the most vulnerable social point in their lives-when they are learning to socialize and understand romantic/sexual attachment. High school is literally a minisociety that creates followers and losers-unless they have the right, sanctioned hobby. Its a society that young adults (18-28 year olds) spend a long time outgrowing. And its completely artificial, unhealthy, and unnecessary.
Perhaps GenX/Millenials get this.
anonymousse
'Having a more cynical view of pro sports, the Gen X and Millennial observers are more likely to point out blacks' behavioral advantages for gladiator sports, such as acting like uncontrollable thugs. Not such a positive spin on racial differences.'
ReplyDeleteOn the Castefootball.us website (which does have some Boomer posters) the relationship between white football owners/coaches and on-the-verge-of-flying-out-of-control black athletes is sometimes likened to a modern plantation. There is an unsettling sort of paternalism of guilt ridden (or perhaps disturbed) whites giving sometimes psychotic, sometimes borderline retarded blacks countless excuses, opportunities and shortcuts regardless of the black athletes character.
Meanwhile, skilled and reliable white athletes at many positions will get ignored. I remember some sports website or magazine doing a test where a guy posed as a high school coach and called college recruiters. When the coach told a scout about a fictional running back with a stereotypically 'white' name (like say, Scott Feretti) the scout tended to lose interest. Players with obviously black names (like Tyrone Wright) got more enthusiasm.
I also wonder if todays wannabe 4 star General coaches are nervous about intelligent athletes not being as impressionable as the dumb brutes. That might explain a reluctance to give whites a chance at positions that don't require as much intelligence.
The experience of pro golf is contra. Players are much bigger now than in the '60s and '70s. But things are far less competitive because of the huge money involved. The joke on tour is that many players don't even care about winning, since if you can make the cut in 15-18 tournaments you can still win close to a mlion and secure your card for the next season.
ReplyDeleteJust came across this article about football and head injuries:
ReplyDeletehttps://sports.vice.com/article/nfl-players-didnt-know-the-dangers-of-playing-football-and-neither-did-anyone-else
Interestingly, there was an epidemic of fatalities in the early 1900's (the Teddy Roosevelt era), but concern grew and the sport got more civilized by the 30's.
Indicative of mid century sportsmanship, there's a mid 50's quote from Hall of Famer Otto Graham that the sport was getting too rough and that he didn't want players to hurt the sports reputation. Contrast that with the modern apathy towards barbaric trends (most players today say that they don't think the sport is too violent).
With regard to high inequality/ high competitiveness correlating with high immigration levels and every man for himself type behavior, check out this quote from Teddy Roosevelt (who died in 1919, which would make this quote from the high inequality late 1800's/early 1900's).:
"It is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man's fitness for citizenship... We can not afford to consider whether he is Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile; whether he is Englishman or Irishman, Frenchman or German, Japanese, Italian, or Scandinavian or Magyar. What we should desire to find out is the individual quality of the individual man.."
No regard at all for purity or cohesiveness of a given nation or ethnic group. Just a degrading, autistic disregard for the greater good and willful ignorance or apathy regarding the differences (and possible incompatibilities) between ethnic groups.
Note also the focus on a 'man' or 'individual' rather than consideration of the need to place others before oneself. Is there a way to quanitfy how often the word individual appears in a given time period? I'll bet the word became less used when modesty and good faith es·prit de corps peaked in the 30's-60's.
Counting words can get tricky. If you just want to know what topics were under discussion, then it's fine to just count. But if you want to put your finger on the pulse of the culture, you have to know what the emotional charge is -- are they mocking or celebrating individualism?
ReplyDeleteThe sports culture before the Great Compression was about as barbaric as it is now. Bare-knuckles boxing was a big thing in the Gilded Age, and the violent tangle of boxers' bodies (uh, yeah) is the focus of the painting Stag at Sharkey's. Latter-day gladiator worship. Also seen into the '20s with Bellows' painting of Firpo vs. Dempsey.
Boxing used to allow unlimited rounds in the early 20th C, and only restricted them to 12 or 15 circa 1920. Part of the broader movement toward regulating what had been laissez-faire.
And of course the sports culture was hopelessly corrupt, a natural result of the status-striving me-first morality, culminating in the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Already by the mid-'20s with The Great Gatsby, that event was immortalized as a prime example of how degraded and polluted the culture had been in recent memory. Attitudes were already changing by then.
When George Bailey finds himself in Pottersville, is there something about boxing or gladiator worship? That was intended as a reminder of how vice-ridden America had been in the early 20th C. They captured the red light district atmosphere, but I don't recall them including the lust for bloodsports.
ReplyDeleteBy all accounts, the climate that produced the Black Sox was quite libertine and fatalistic. Yeah, there's indulgent and ambitious excesses, but that's just the way things are. Sound familar?
ReplyDeleteThe various parties involved in the scheme (players, big shot gamblers, crime lords) were plagued by such mutual greed and treachery that it became almost farcical. Players would unpredictably drop in and out of the fix because the underworld figures and their lackeys were constantly breaking promises and screwing each other as well as the players.
As you would expect a small handful of powerful gangsters made a killing while everyone else, players included, got almost nothing for their trouble.
Maybe the biggest joke of all was the trial of the 8 'dirty' players. The chicanery that went on like evidence disappearing, jury tampering, showboating by the judge/prosecuter and lawyers, inspired the courtroom (including some of the more uncouth, flippant players) to raucous laughter.
This stuff is cyclical, isn't it? The grandstanding, vulgar irreverence, arrogant abuse of power and privilege, ambitious short term self interest at the expense of greater long term good and so forth. We're emulating right now the debased culture of the 19th/early 20th century.
It's also dawned on me that these periods of high inequality and excesses produce a culture where nothing ever gets done efficiently and cleanly. As you see with the Black Sox, there is so much selfish greed and ambition that people become unable to put self interest and paranoia aside and just get on with the task at hand.
I think Agnostic has tried to explain why Gen X-ers beginning in the 90's didn't seem as inspired and can-do as they did in the 80's. Millenials also suffer from that malaise. Maybe that's because in the late period of a high inequality era, people are so selfish and/ or mistrustful that they no longer function very well in groups, even similar groups with a clear goal.
I could've worded that last sentence a little better. What I meant was that very late in a high inequality cycle, people end up suffering from so much mutual ambition and paranoia that trust and good faith plummet to such a low level that all human relations and endeavors suffer.
ReplyDeleteWives and husbands constantly divorcing, politicians in contempt of the public, CEO's grossly exploiting workers, workplace drama, 'friendships' that are ephemeral, etc. It's not shocking that so little ends up being actually accomplished when everyone looks out for themselves while keeping others at a football field length distance. It does indeed take a village to design and maintain a society worth living in.
Also, Steve Sailer regularly brings up the topic of how excruciatingly slow development/physical change is in Los Angeles and surrounding cities. A city that, go figure, is the most multicultural in human history and also a place full of highly privileged elites of an advanced age who's insistence on peacocking over everything makes it impossible for people to set aside petty self interests and do things expediently for everyone's sake.
ReplyDeleteSteve recently noted that Me Generation icon Rob Reiner has led the attack on putting anything on an eternally empty stretch of Malibu. It doesn't really matter why he's against it, what matters is that his narcissistic blather is a sign of how cynical people conspire to dawdle and bicker rather than get things done.
I do think that everybody regardless of age is partly responsible for the mess we're in, though the Me Generation is obviously inflicting the most egregious damage.
We might distinguish between mechanical inefficiency and social inefficiency.
ReplyDeleteMechanical is the worker who isn't 100% Taylorized in his repetitive motions, or the Walmart supply chain that isn't 100% optimized. Periods of status-striving and inequality focus on minimizing this kind of inefficiency. It doesn't matter if people, even entire low-ranking organizations, are being treated like cogs in a machine for the robber baron -- what matters is making the robber baron wealthier and more powerful. There are illegal and shady ways to do that, but here is a less shady way -- pleasing consumers more by optimizing the cogs in your productive machine.
Social inefficiency is what Putnam is talking about with diversity. Too many different languages (literally), too many distinct / unshared systems of norms and norm enforcement, too many conflicting sets of collective goals, too many different histories to bind everyone together, and so on and so forth. No one trusts anyone, nothing gets done at the collective level, and so everything public falls into disrepair.
During the Great Compression, the goal was to minimize social inefficiency, not foolishly trying to squeeze more blood from the stone of mechanical efficiency. In fact, they didn't just leave things where they were, they dialed them back to before the Taylorization craze took over. Operations were more mechanically inefficient during the Great Compression -- but more socially efficient. The widespread union system was another aspect of that trade-off.
We need to do the same thing today -- dial the Walmart-ization of the economy back to the levels of 1970 or 1980, accept the resulting drop in mechanical efficiency, and enjoy the gain in social efficiency that will come from other neo-Progressive policies like ending immigration, closing down red light districts (this time around, including much of the porno world), trust-busting, and all the rest of it.
I guess I erred a little in saying efficiency; I was more getting at a sense of everyone-is-at-each other's-throatsitis which as you say leads to fiascoes arising from everyone being weighed down by conflicting ambitions, distrust and treachery.
ReplyDelete" neo-Progressive policies like ending immigration, closing down red light districts (this time around, including much of the porno world), trust-busting, and all the rest of it."
I think a lot of this stuff kind of self-corrects with goverment action/policies being a product of the general public's appetite for vice or virtue. 70's-early 90's porn was relatively wholesome because people didn't want to see more degrading stuff.
I think that some liberal and conservatives are off base when they want to believe that we're all pure and innocent but some powerful evil force (the goverment, hollywood, corporations, unions) is corrupting us. We need to acknowledge that ultimately the wrongs perpetrated by these forces wouldn't be possible if people's behavior improved. After all, those things aren't run by aliens or robots.
Also, in the increasing modesty of the 20's-50's, history increasingly revised/embellished the idea that the public was outraged by the Black Sox. In reality, the 1919 public was so jaded and decadent that people weren't very worked up about it when life was so coarse. Indeed, how could one be shocked by the fix when the previous baseball season saw many players punished for gambling and underworld connections.
The reaction back then to conspiracies and corruption was similar to how it is now. By the time you get to the late period of a high inequality era people tend to yawn for the most part. Some are too distracted by indulgence and ambition too even really notice or care.
When we transition from one era to another, I think there's a tendency to look at other eras through the current mindset rather than the one that existed at the time. When we finally begin to adopt more modest and conscientious values again, I think there's going to be a lot of retroactive outrage about the excesses of the 90's-2010's that won't appreciate how the jaded public of that time period yawned about these things.