One of baseball's most renowned players and a towering figure in the sport's history, Hank Aaron, frequently talked about how the game changed during his playing career. He made the well-known observation that, even in practice, pitchers no longer aimed their pitches directly down the middle of the plate for batters to hit.

Aaron grew up in a time when hitting a baseball was both an art and a science, and many games depended on a batter's ability to lay off pitches that were tempting but outside the strike zone. As players grew increasingly strategic, the pitching technique changed. Pitchers began to concentrate on movement, speed, and positioning their pitches so that batters would have a hard time hitting them squarely.

Think of baseball as an orchestra. In the past, every batter expected to follow a single, unobstructed path through the center of the pitch. There are increasingly fewer direct shots down the middle for batters to hit these days as pitchers act as conductors, guiding each player's movements to produce a symphony of strategy and unpredictability.

Aaron was renowned for his ability to hit nearly any pitch that was thrown to him and for having a sharp eye at the plate, but he also understood that as time went on, pitchers got better at putting hitters in the sweet spot with deceptive pitches rather than simple ones. This development is in line with more general baseball trends, like the growing focus on player specialization and analytics.

Aaron made the observation that if batters weren't ready to face pitches that weren't thrown straight down the middle, every swing at bat would become a challenge rather than a chance for big hits. This observation demonstrated how the tactical landscape of the game had changed.