The steroid era was also the tail-end of the 'cookie cutter stadium' era. I don't want to go back to that. Now it's only Toronto remaining, and their field is a lot nicer than it used to be now that the Argos left.

I do miss seeing more balls put in play. We're at an all-time low there. Now we have low averages (high strikeouts), low on-base percentages...

The home run numbers are dirty. One nice thing about them, though, is that it made fans more suspicious of cross-generational comparisons—as they should be. There's not much in these numbers when you lift them out of their context. What was great was not in the summing up or the historical analysis, it was in the games.

And the games are good now. And we get to watch so many more of them. If you get MLB.TV, you even get to turn broadcasters off and listen to the park audio only! It's a real dream. Blackouts are a pain if you're a cord-cutter, but it's still a leap forward. In 1998, you pretty much had your local team's games, Atlanta, the Cubs, and an occasional national broadcast, and you had to listen to all the same old prattle every game.

As for this:

I was way more into it and liked the players more too.

How old were you? This is a pretty ordinary sentiment for anyone under the age of 16 or 20 at the time. We don't tend to form the same emotional attachments to these kinds of things as adults.