Now, Winfield Probably Just Wants a Nice Quiet Retirement

Recently, Sportsnet celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Blue Jays' 1992 World Series win by replaying all six games of that series.  Desperate for something to balance all the College football on TV, and with no hockey and most channels dominated by repeats or marathons, I found myself actually watching a lot of it.  Partly it was nostalgia, partly fascination at how much the sport and television has changed.

So here are the some of the interesting things that I noticed during the 1992 World Series rerun:

• There isn't much advertising in the stadium, just a few Labatts ads in the Skydome.  Even stranger, some of the ads in Atlanta are for Marlboro, one of them complete with the Marlboro Man.  Another is for Fuji Film.  Remember film?
• Where are all the tattoos?
• Even after all these years, it sounds wrong to hear American announcers call Manny Lee, "Manuel" Lee
• For that matter, I can't believe they only have two announcers.  Where's the gratuitous roving audience reporter?
• The SkyDome looks totally different when it's full.
• Brett Lawrie is the spiritual successor to Kelly Gruber. To answer one comment I saw on Twitter, I think he's the one that will follow Gruber and Todd Stottlemyre in the Jays' tradition of cutting his chin in an ungraceful slide in the World Series.
• What's with the giant graphics?  Were our TVs really that small then?  And so plain looking; My phone could do better.
• Speaking of which: nobody in the stands is on a phone.  How are they telling their friends they're on TV?
• And I have to wait for them to put up the score?  What's wrong with leaving it in the corner of the screen?  Oh, it would be too tiny on their itsy-bitsy TVs.
• All the stats are just the simple ones I learned as a child.  Where's the WHIP and OPS?
• I still can't believe how easy Devon White makes centre field look.  Or how small a bat looks in Dave Winfield's hands.
• That pale green Astroturf really looks bad.
• Since a lot of the people in sports audiences aren't up to the latest style to begin with, everyone in the stands looks even more out of date than twenty years.  There wasn't nearly as much flannel as you would expect for the early nineties.
• It's been a while since I heard anyone marvel at how modern the SkyDome is the way the commentators did.
• On the other hand, calling it the SkyDome doesn't really seem that odd, which I take as a measure of how the Rogers Centre moniker hasn't fit.
• I still can't believe how into the game Jane Fonda gets.  You'd think she and Ted Turner would have lasted.
• Atlanta's old stadium looks, um, "short".  I've become used to baseball stadiums having three decks of seats and a wall of luxury boxes.
• The transitions between replays and live shots (with a sort of zoom-in diamond shape) looks like something out of the seventies.  I expect computer-generated baseballs rolling across the screen and exploding or something.
• I'd forgotten what great moustaches baseball used to have.  Sid Bream and Jack Morris, we miss you.
• It's a little depressing to watch it already knowing which players wouldn't be back the next year.
• A part of me can't believe they won it again.