If you're old enough to have played 20+ years of different baseball video games, it is simply impossible to "go back" to that mentality. The reason we have lost that innocence is because a lot of us got in pretty much on the ground floor, so to speak, of baseball gaming, and have gone through 20 or more years worth of technological advancement in the games. Everyone always loves to wax nostalgic about all the great games of yore (myself included), but if you really think back, some of this "loss of innocence" could have been applied even then. Look at the difference between something like Atari Real Sports Baseball and RBI or Bases Loaded. Do you believe that, after playing the latter two titles, most people would have accepted a baseball game that came out afterwards with graphics and gameplay akin to the Atari game? Methinks not. As the technology of the baseball games progressed and matured, so did our expectations for them.
The games were a hell of a lot simpler then, but our minds and experiences with the games were a hell of a lot simpler to match them. It goes hand in hand.