The defining stories, players of the decade

Every baseball decade has its own flavor, a way to establish it as a clearly delineated period of time, an era with its own distinct personality. We had the rough-and-tumble 1970s, with its off-field drama, its Bronx-Is-Burning real-life parallels of chaos, its seemingly endless amount of body hair. The ’80s were the speed decade; Astroturf, Whiteyball, Rickey Being Rickey. The ’90s were heavy with import from start to finish, with labor strife knocking out a World Series but transitioning into the glories of Cal Ripken and the home run chase of 1998. The 2000s were the homer-happy decade, with records falling seemingly every year for reasons that are still being hotly debated today.