[Buldak]

The article suggests that the original Olympic athletes aimed at some ineffable ideal of human form, not just winning. By contrast, athletes now optimize for winning with results that the author finds unappealing. Did baseball players in the 70s really have some more holistic ethos of the game, though? Or were they doing their best to win, just as players do now, but with more imperfect knowledge of how to do it?

As for your suggestion that we ought to optimize the rules themselves (i.e. so that players and teams end up playing in the way that we want), I'm skeptical of this. I have a feeling that, whatever rules we adopt, optimization of the sort in question is liable to produce the same sorts of distortions.