"What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant."
"The triple of Jeremy Brown's imagination, in reality, is a home run."
"Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say."
"People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage."
"Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time."
"Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]"
"The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be."
"That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different."