50 Quotes by Roger Angell

A recent study of three thousand New England high-school kids shows that students with B averages or better enjoyed seventeen to thirty-three minutes more sleep and went to bed ten to fifty minutes earlier than students with C averages.

The best defense against partisanship is expertise.

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.

The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it.

my favorite urban flower, the baseball box score

He was too nervous to travel, by and large.

Law of Probability Dispersal : Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed

I was in my thirties. I wasn't a kid. I think that instinctively I thought I'd have to trust myself and to report about what I was seeing, what I was thinking as a fan, and not to try to fake it by being knowing about these players and their deliveries and all that stuff which I later learned about.