Baseball Season 1 quotes

(Discussing Ichiro) You have to make the perfect pitch to get him. And he's going to make you throw pitches too, which we hate. Pitchers hate to throw more pitches than they should. And even if you get him to hit the ball the wrong way, he's got such great speed that you never know. You might break his bat and still, he gets a base hit.

Bonds has certainly been singled out, but that's what happens when the results of your cheating are so lurid: It attracts attention if you hit 73 home runs. What do you expect? If some middle infielder tries to buy another year scuffling in the big leagues with performance-enhancing drugs, it doesn't get as much attention. This is not complicated.

I think fans have been able to compartmentalize their disappointments and still enjoy it the way they used to, and I think we've built up the same sort of sieve for living experience through that we have with real people in our real lives. We don't expect them to be saints and we no longer expect our athletes to be. We expect them to be the same range of people that we see in the rest of our life. And I think that one of the reasons that baseball has not only not lost popularity but gained it, is as its flaws become apparent, it actually gains depth and humanity even as it loses its fairy tale mythic qualities.