David T - yes and no, I think.
I enjoy Ken Burns' work and think highly of his talents, but the reason the problems that baseball faced in the 1870s appear to be the same as the ones it faces today is because Ken Burns structured and wrote his documentary so as to leave us with that impression. I don't blame him, really - if you're creating 9 or 12 hours of television on the history of baseball or jazz or the Civil War, one way to go about organizing the vast amount of material is to create a catchy but simplistic theme (and then support it with other similarly catchy but simplisitc sub-themes). Yes, in a superficial sense the problems then and now are similar (given, for example, the inherent tensions in management-labour relations), but do we really believe that the owner-player relationship in 1870 is similar to the owner-player relationship of 2009? I may be wrong, but I think players back then might've been fighting for subsistence wages and the status of human beings and not cattle, whereas today the players are fighting for tens of millions of dollars and for superstar vs simply star status. In other words, I think Burns tends to put the demands of narrative structure and flow (as he sees them) above a desire for detail and nuance. Again, I don't mean to criticize too harshly -- in gca terms, it's just that he's very big on obvious and accessible routings, perhaps at the the expense of subtlety and charm.
Mark - similarly, that paragraph rolls of the tongue alright, and I think I understand what Mr. Thomson means to say, but to be honest it seems to me that it could mean just about anything. For example, he equates golf courses that are photogenically stunning and extravagent with gambits of torture, but does that really seem to be the case? The garish and overblown bits of expensive eye-candy that passed themselves off as golf courses for a couple of decades - were these all that hard to play? Or did they instead (more often than not) offer people who'd paid a lot of money to play them the satisfaction of scoring better than they usually did, what with all the elevated tees shaving yards of the posted length and containment mounding not punishing but helping the mishit shot? But then, on the other hand, would it have been better for golf (and more in keeping with the game's noble spirit) if those bits of overblown eye-candy were ALSO tortures of unrelenting shot-testing?
Sorry - don't mean to be too much of a pest, but lately I've been reading quite a lot of marketing and/or self-promotion passing itself off as fact and/or deeply held philosophical belief.
Peter