In 1990, Pay Phones were our only bridge to the live baseball world

I love stuff like this. Seeing where we’ve come from and how far we’ve come.

Baseball Prospectus reminds us of a nice little project that Pepper Hastings, the senior editor of Beckett Baseball Monthly; set out to complete. Pepper wanted to obtain a working pay phone number for each of the 26 stadiums in Major League Baseball.

This wreaks of the same kind of classic retro workflows without automation like the score-keeping of fantasy baseball leagues (I still know of one guy who does it that way for traditions sake) and All-Star voting being done solely on the paper ballots that were handed out at the ballpark.

I miss early 90’s baseball, and the innocence we all had back then. There are times when I wish we didn’t have the convenience of a few taps of our smartphones to know a guy’s complete stat line for the night, how many fastballs he threw, and every team’s score in the league for the evening.

It reminds me of the days of missing box scores because my parents didn’t get the paper except on the weekends. If my grandma didn’t save the daily sports page, I would have to catch up on what Eric Davis and Barry Larkin did on certain nights in a two week old edition of Baseball Weekly.

Yet, for some reason I want to go back to the payphone era.