A WORLDVIEW EXPLAINED: This good article by James Poniewozik has the following nugget that can be extended to other contexts. The controversy over the proposed cancellation of "Nightline:"
is less about that one show than about journalists' eternal belief that the golden age of their profession is always twenty years before whatever the present time happens to be.
Substitute "baseball" for "their profession," and you have a perfect expression of the worldview of most sportswriters. In both editions of his Historical Baseball Abstract and in his other writings, Bill James had a funny feature called "Old Ballplayers Never Die," which would cite quotes from old baseball figures regarding the no-good players of the day, the decline of the game and of competitive balance, etc. Most of those quotes could pass for ones uttered today, and were as foolish then as their successors are now.