My sports journey began in the 1980s, and undoubtedly my youth at the time clouds my recollection of how things were back then.
It does seem safe to say at leas, though, that roster building was less complicated 40 or so years ago than it is now.
There were nuances and free agency. Some teams were closer to championship quality while others were rebuilding.
But much of a roster boiled down to this: If a veteran player was good, you wanted to retain that player. If they were not good, you wanted to rid yourself of that player.
Some teams spent more than others, but not to an excessive degree. In 1985 in Major League Baseball, the league I followed most closely from about that year through roughly the next decade, the middle teams in terms of player spending — throwing out the top-five and bottom-five teams — all had payrolls between $9 million and $12 million.
There were no salary caps. Rookie scale contracts in most leagues wouldn’t arrive for another decade, at least.
It’s almost hard to remember a simpler time like this, particularly now that fans out of necessity have turned themselves into amateur contractual experts.
On Monday’s Daily Delivery podcast, Patrick Reusse and finished up by talking about Sam Darnold’s status with the Vikings. I found myself later in the morning thinking about how complicated it is — and how different it might have been when I was a young fan in the 1980s.
