Mike Schmidt Lamenting How Baseball Became All About Home Runs is Kind of Strange

Mike Schmidt was a god for the Philadelphia Phillies throughout the 1970s and 80s, manning the hot corner throughout a brilliant career that landed him in the Hall of Fame.

Understandably, he sees the game through the lens of the era in which he played, and in a new article he penned for the AP, he detailed why he's having a problem accepting the fact that so many more home runs are being hit these days than ever before.

In the short op-ed, Schmidt laments about how the game has lost the stickball mentality now that bunts, steals, and hit-and-runs are becoming rarer and swinging for the fences becomes seemingly the sole directive.

There's only one problem: Schmidt himself hit 548 home runs throughout his 18-year career. He wasn't exactly Ichiro or Rod Carew out there.

It seems a bit funny that Schmidt is complaining about the overwhelming rate of home runs in today's game when he was known for hitting plenty of dingers himself while claiming an unspectacular .267 career batting average.

Schmidt complaining about an increase in home runs at the expense of more careful strategizing is one thing, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a beneficiary of the power game in baseball, nor does it mean that he contributed so frequently to the aspects of the game that he misses so dearly.

Maybe he feels bad that players who can hit a baseball a country mile aren't as rare as they used to be while he was playing. Either way, he sure is an interesting candidate for taking up this fight.