I knew hard times lay ahead, but after a while, as I broke a slight sweat in the afternoon sun while enjoying the sound of a ball smacking leather, things seemed just a little better, if only for those few moments.
Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was the biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky.
Baseball isn't just a game. It's the smell of popcorn drifting in the air, the sight of bugs buzzing near the stadium lights,the roughness of the dirt beneath your cleats. It's the anticipation building in your chest as the anthem plays, the adrenaline rush when your bat cracks against the ball, and the surge of blood when the umpire shouts strike after you pitch. It's a team full of guys backing your every move, a bleacher full of people cheering you on. It's ... life.
Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.
I am sorry,' said Monty. 'I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.'
If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'
She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on the sole of her left foot and walking was painful. But the real reason she carried a stick was so she could hit things with it, things like dogs and cats and small children.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls.
You make me puke.