Roger Kahn

"You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it."

"The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat."

"I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes."

"In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer."

"At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams."

"Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves."

"The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon."

"In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game."

"When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home."

"One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brooklyn Dodgers was the excitement of their play."

"What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game."

"No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day."