History my god. An incurable diarrhea of dead immortals.

And so, finally, he’d found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much – to tell the truth, real baseball bored him – but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.

Maybe it all went back to the days when games were decided, not by the best score in nine innings, but by the first team to score twenty-one runs.

American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability – the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action – that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project.

Some ways of naming a generation are fruitful and some are not. Postmodernism is not. It doesn’t really say anything.

What we got is NOW, Huck, and now is forever. Until it ain’t. So, you can’t worry over nothing except putting off the end a your story as long as you can, and finishing it with a bang.

No matter how much sunlight and fresh air she lets in, there’s always this dark little pocket of lingering night which she has to uncover.

Some have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction.

Bottom half of the seventh, Brock’s boy had made it through another inning unscratched, one! two! three! Twenty-one down and just six outs to go! and Henry’s heart was racing, he was sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them! Oh yes, boys, it was on!

Message of the Legalists: without law, power lost its shape.