“
Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.
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”
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
“
His life has been like a ballpark, hasn't it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he's been hit over the wall into unknown territory.
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Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
“
If the fans don’t wanna come out to the ballpark, no one can stop ‘em.
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Yogi Berra
“
Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immortals.
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David Ogilvy
“
words...words were one thing. Actions were a totally different ballpark.
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Jennifer L. Armentrout (Origin (Lux, #4))
“
Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.
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Ann Patchett (Commonwealth)
“
I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I saw a ballpark. I'd thought nothing would ever replace cricket. Wow! Fenway Park at 7 o'clock in the evening. Oh, just, magic beyond magic: never got over that
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Simon Schama
“
Don't bunt. Aim out of the ballpark.
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David Ogilvy
“
A ballpark at night is more like a church than a church
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W.P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe: Field Of Dreams)
“
There's a reason diehard fans get to the ballpark hours before game time. It’s not for better parking. It’s not for extra time to find our seats. It’s not so we’ll have time to down an extra hot dog, heavy on the mustard, prior to the first pitch. It’s called BP.
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Tucker Elliot (Major League Baseball IQ: The Ultimate Test of True Fandom)
“
New Rule: Don't name your kid after a ballpark. Cubs fans Paul and Teri Fields have named their newborn son Wrigley. Wrigley Fields. A child is supposed to be an independent individual, not a means of touting your own personal hobbies. At least that's what I've always taught my kids, Panama Red and Jacuzzi.
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Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
“
After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads, over the harbor, over their dirty baseball field, past the rude, red-hot projects where they lived. The Negro leagues, Sport said, were a dream. Why, Negro league players had leg muscles like rocks.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Let’s see if I can synopsize our situation,” he said. “I never give interviews. You want an interview. No, strike that. You need an interview, because the rabid jackal you work for has made it clear your job is on the line. Am I close?”
The sizzle receded to a tingle. “You’re in the ballpark.”
“I’m not just in the ballpark, babe. I’m Josh Beckett on the mound at Fenway. If I don’t give you what you need, you’re hiding behind palm trees waiting for drunk pop stars to pop out of their Wonderbras.”
And that pretty much killed the last of the lingering tingle. “Payback’s a bitch and all that, right, Joe?”
The dimples flashed. “Isn’t it?
”
”
Shannon Stacey (Exclusively Yours (Kowalski Family, #1))
“
It’s like being in the ballpark with Jesus.
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Jane Leavy (Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy)
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[B]aseball is diffracted by the town and ballpark where it is played... Does baseball, like a liquid, take the shape of its container?
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”
Thomas Boswell (Why Time Begins on Opening Day)
“
We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral.
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Robert Michael Pyle (Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place)
“
A brick is a biographical film in which a young orphan brick from the wrong side of the track grows up to be one of the most important bricks in all brick kind, as it is now quite literally the cornerstone of one of America’s greatest ballparks.(Fenway)
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Nicole Riekhof (A bit of rubbish about a Brick and a Blanket)
“
Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model.
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Stephanie Coontz (The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap)
“
There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us.
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”
Tucker Elliot
“
You can say, 'Well, if they tore down Fenway Park, we can build a new one.' But you wouldn’t build it right. It’s better to make the accommodations, to save the old ballparks. If Fenway Park needs sky boxes to bring in the poverty-stricken owners enough money to save the stadium before they tear it down and move it someplace else, then build the damn sky boxes. If Wrigley Field needs lights to survive, put up the damn lights.... Make the damn structural improvements, but save the ballpark because when you try to rebuild a cathedral five hundred years too late, it doesn’t come out the same.
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”
Tom Boswell
“
Gabriel Edward Mackie, born with soulful maturity and an intrinsic sense of empathy, gazed at life through a poetic contemplative lens relishing the plangent sounds of the wind dancing through the trees during a thunderstorm, inhaling the nutty scent of roasted peanuts at the ballpark, and firmly believing that if he stretched his arms high enough, he could touch his dreams. Driven by his keen curiosity, ability to find a silver lining in the darkest cloud, and vision, he spent boundless energy revering nature’s rarities like the spidery veins in between rose petals and a heron’s powder down feathers.
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JoDee Neathery (A Kind of Hush)
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There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wait Till Next Year)
“
Different studies suggest different dietary changes in response to climate change, but the ballpark is pretty clear. The most comprehensive assessment of the livestock industry’s environmental impact was published in Nature in October 2018. After analyzing food-production systems from every country around the world, the authors concluded that while undernourished people living in poverty across the globe could actually eat a little more meat and dairy, the average world citizen needs to shift to a plant-based diet in order to prevent catastrophic, irreversible environmental damage. The average U.S. and U.K. citizen must consume 90 percent less beef and 60 percent less dairy. How would anyone keep track of that? No animal products for breakfast or lunch. It might not amount to precisely the reductions that are asked for, but it’s just about right, and easy to remember.
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Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
Avoid the temptation to cut corners - accuracy and transparency are essential. Hiring an accountant may cost you money upfront, but could save you a lot of money in the long run.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.
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Bill Veeck
“
You want someone in the ballpark and then you grow together. Thats what a relashionship's about: changing each other.
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Grayson Perry
“
His participation was in the ballpark of a pity fuck.
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Janet Evanovich (Two for the Dough (Stephanie Plum, #2))
“
A guesstimate?” prompted the man Enrique. “About your dad?” “Ballpark will do,” the Korean lady said.
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Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
Not even in the right ballpark”? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball.
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Sam Harris (Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion)
“
Once, when he couldn’t find his limousine upon leaving a ballpark, he was heard saying, “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.
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David Grann (The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession)
“
JESUS’S PATH WAS exactly that, a radically unmanageable simplicity—nothing held back, nothing held onto. It was almost too much for his followers to bear. Even within the gospels themselves, we see a tendency to rope him back in again, to turn his teachings into a manageable complexity. Take his radically simple saying: “Those who would lose their life will find it; and those who would keep it will lose it.” Very quickly the gospels add a caveat: “Those who would lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it.” That may be the way you’ve always heard this teaching, even though most biblical scholars agree that the italicized words are a later addition. But you can see what this little addition has done: it has shifted the ballpark away from the transformation of consciousness (Jesus’s original intention) and into martyrdom, a set of sacrificial actions you can perform with your egoic operating system still intact. Right from
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Cynthia Bourgeault (The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind)
“
If you choose to be undefined, no one else may have the same points of view as you. They may not even be able to find you, let alone the ballpark where you are playing or the universe in which you are living.
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Dain Heer (Being You, Changing The World)
“
Shelley says some people were born on third base and some people were born outside the ballpark, and the journey to home plate ain’t the same for all. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to, like, find a way to get everybody in the game?
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Lori Lansens (This Little Light)
“
The ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star. A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England's pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence. It works as a place to watch baseball
”
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Martin F. Nolan
“
This is a time in baseball when steroids have become a pretty big deal. On our team, you got Barry Bonds, who is hitting home runs like a mortar barrage, and whose head has grown to a size where when they make his promotional bobble-head, they just do the whole thing to scale, while across the bay in Oakland, Mark McGwire now has forearms like Popeye and will only speak in dialects of horse, and they’re keeping José Canseco chained to a post under the ballpark and throwing him raw meat until right before game time, so the league is starting to get sensitive about it.
”
”
Christopher Moore (Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper, #2))
“
Nick and I, we sometimes laugh, laugh out loud, at the horrible things women make their husbands do to prove their love. The pointless tasks, the myriad sacrifices, the endless small surrenders. We call these men the dancing monkeys. Nick will come home, sweaty and salty and beer-loose from a day at the ballpark,and I’ll curl up in his lap, ask him about the game, ask him if his friend Jack had a good time, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, he came down with a case of the dancing monkeys – poor Jennifer was having a “real stressful week” and really needed him at home.’ Or his buddy at work, who can’t go out for drinks because his girlfriend really needs him to stop by some bistro where she is having dinner with a friend from out of town. So they can finally meet. And so she can show how obedient her monkey is: He comes when I call, and look how well groomed! Wear this, don’t wear that. Do this chore now and do this chore when you get a chance and by that I mean now. And definitely, definitely, give up the things you love for me, so I will have proof that you love me best. It’s the female pissing contest – as we swan around our book clubs and our cocktail hours, there are few things women love more than being able to detail the sacrifices our men make for us. A call-and-response, the response being: ‘Ohhh, that’s so sweet.’ I am happy not to be in that club. I don’t partake, I don’t get off on emotional coercion, on forcing Nick to play some happy-hubby role – the shrugging, cheerful, dutiful taking out the trash, honey! role. Every wife’s dream man, the counterpoint to every man’s fantasy of the sweet, hot, laid-back woman who loves sex and a stiff drink. I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it. I don’t need pathetic dancing-monkey scenarios to repeat to my friends, I am content with letting him be himself. I don’t know why women find that so hard.
”
”
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
“
Nick will come home, sweaty and salty and beer-loose from a day at the ballpark, and I’ll curl up in his lap, ask him about the game, ask him if his friend Jack had a good time, and he’ll say, “Oh, he came down with a case of the dancing monkeys—poor Jennifer was having a ‘real stressful week’ and really needed him at home.
”
”
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
“
I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women’s breasts and backsides, the colors of water, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses, the shapes of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe, are celebrated. Let us rush to see the world. They serve steak there on jet planes, and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to music and the sound of bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They have even invented engines to cut their grass. They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos, vast manufactories of all kinds. They explore space and the trenches of the sea. Oh, let us rush to see this world.
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”
John Cheever (The Journals of John Cheever)
“
Here’s a list (not exhaustive, by any means!) of phrases that make the Bullsh*t Bingo list. Scrub them from your vocabulary! They will make your talk sound dated and stale. • Synergy • Out of the box • Bottom line • Revisit • 24/7 • Out of the loop • Benchmark • Value-added • Proactive • Win-win • Think outside the box • Fast track • Result-driven • Empower (or empowerment) • Knowledge base • At the end of the day • Touch base • Ballpark • Game plan • Leverage
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Peter Meyers (As We Speak)
“
Confusion over how a person's extraordinary skill is developed runs deep. The heated debate over writer Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hour rule," as put forth i his popular book Outliers: The Story of Success, indicates that it is not just refeerees who get tongue-tied trying to pinpoint the fundaments of their expertise. Proficiency in activities from musicianship to athletics, Gladwell contends, can be achieved only through vast amount of practice (10,000 hours was the ballpark figure he cited, applying it to the triumphs of Bill Gates and the Beatles, among others.)
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Bob Katz (The Whistleblower: Rooting for the Ref in the High-Stakes World of College Basketball)
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He’d never played in Wrigley Field—the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid’s dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon’s eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. “Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant,” he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park—and the city.
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Harry Turtledove (Striking the Balance (Worldwar, #4))
“
Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well.
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Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
“
Some have estimated that the pharmaceutical industry overall spends about twice as much on marketing and promotion as it does on research and development. Regardless of how those two figures compare to each other, the fact that they are in the same ballpark gives one pause, and this is worth mulling over in various contexts. For example, when a drug company refuses to let a developing country have affordable access to a new AIDS drug it’s because – the company says – it needs the money from sales to fund research and development on other new AIDS drugs for the future. If R&D is a fraction of the company’s outgoings, and it spends a similar amount on promotion, then this moral and practical argument doesn’t hold water quite so well. The scale of this spend is fascinating in itself, when you put it in the context of what we all expect from evidence-based medicine, which is that people will simply use the best treatment for the patient. Because when you pull away from the industry’s carefully fostered belief that this marketing activity is all completely normal, and stop thinking of drugs as being a consumer product like clothes or cosmetics, you suddenly realise that medicines marketing only exists for one reason. In medicine, brand identities are irrelevant, and there’s a factual, objective answer to whether one drug is the most likely to improve a patient’s pain, suffering and longevity. Marketing, therefore, one might argue, exists for no reason other than to pervert evidence-based decision-making in medicine.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients)
“
make sure everyone understands where he stands on this question, let me leave Hume for a moment and break down the assertion into smaller steps. The first, most elementary proposition is that people vary in their knowledge of any given field. That much seems beyond dispute. The next assertion is that the nature of a person’s appreciation of a thing or event varies with the level of knowledge that a person brings to it. All of us can easily think of a range of subjects in which our own level of knowledge varies from ignorant to expert. If you know a lot about baseball, for example, you and an ignorant friend who accompanies you to the ballpark are watching different games when there is one out, runners on first and third, and the batter is ahead in the count.8 The things you are thinking about and looking for as the pitcher delivers the next pitch never cross your ignorant companion’s mind. Is your friend as excited by the game as you? Having as much fun? Maybe or maybe not, but that’s not the point. Your appreciation of what is happening is objectively greater. You are better able to apprehend an underlying reality inhering in the object, and it has nothing to do with your sentiments.
”
”
Charles Murray (Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950)
“
For the briefest of seconds, it was like he looked back into the stands, like maybe he spotted me, shaking my rattle, giving him all the encouragement I could. I could have sworn I saw a corner of his mouth curl up. Then he did the whole Velcro batting glove thing and stepped up to the plate.
The pitch came.
He swung.
Crack!
He hit it! He hit it! I jumped up and started shouting.
I had a second to see the stunned look on his face, like maybe he’d never hit the ball before, but that couldn’t be…
And then I realized what it was. As he started running, he turned his head, his gaze following the ball…
The ball that went out of the ballpark!
Right over the Backyard Mania billboard!
Home run!
My boyfriend had hit a home run!
I jumped around, pointing at the number on my jersey, hugging Bird, hugging Tiffany, watching Jason slapping his coach’s hand as he rounded third. I watched him cross home plate, wearing the biggest grin on his face.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” Bird said.
“That we’re ahead two to nothing?”
“It means he’ll insist you sit in this exact spot for every game. He’ll think this is the good luck spot.”
“No way.”
“Either that, or he’ll ask you not to wash your underwear.”
“Ew! That’s so not happening. Maybe I can convince him it was wearing the jersey.”
Yeah, I thought. That’s the ticket.
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
I was a kid in Florida, in Sarasota, and the New York Giants trained in Sarasota. When teams would come, we’d stand outside the ballpark, and we would get the balls they hit over the fence during batting practice. We’d sell them to the tourists. And we made a stepladder so we could climb a pine tree out there. That way we could look into the ballpark.
The Yanks were in town. I’m out there behind the fence, and I hear this sound. I’d never heard THAT sound off the bat before. Instead of me running to get the ball, I ran up the ladder to see who was hitting it. Well, it was a barrel-chested sucker, with skinny legs, with the best swing I’d ever seen. That was Babe Ruth hitting that ball. Yeah.
I don’t hear that sound again until 1938, I’m with the Monarchs, we’re at Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C. We’re upstairs, changing clothes, and the Grays are taking batting practice. I’ve got nothing on but my jock. And I hear that sound. I ran down the runway, ran out on the field, and there’s a pretty black sucker with a big chest and about 34 in the waist, prettiest man I’d ever seen. That was Josh Gibson hitting that ball.
And I don’t hear the sound again until I’m a scout with the Cubs. I’m scouting the Royals. When I opened the door to go downstairs, I heard that sound again. I rushed down on the field, and here’s another pretty black sucker hitting that ball. That was Bo Jackson. That’s three times I heard the sound. Three times. But I want to hear it a fourth. I go to the ballpark every day. I want to hear that sound again.
”
”
Buck O’Neil
“
I’m trying to assess how many how manies I’ll need to start a baseball team. I need a ballpark figure.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
So what’s the computational power of a human brain measured in the bits and FLOPS from chapter 2?*4 This is a delightfully tricky question, and the answer depends dramatically on how we ask it: • Question 1: How many FLOPS are needed to simulate a brain? • Question 2: How many FLOPS are needed for human intelligence? • Question 3: How many FLOPS can a human brain perform? There have been lots of papers published on question 1, and they typically give answers in the ballpark of a hundred petaFLOPS, i.e., 1017 FLOPS.58 That’s about the same computational power as the Sunway TaihuLight (figure 3.7), the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2016, which cost about $300 million.
”
”
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
So far, the smallest memory device known to be evolved and used in the wild is the genome of the bacterium Candidatus Carsonella ruddii, storing about 40 kilobytes, whereas our human DNA stores about 1.6 gigabytes, comparable to a downloaded movie. As mentioned in the last chapter, our brains store much more information than our genes: in the ballpark of 10 gigabytes electrically (specifying which of your 100 billion neurons are firing at any one time) and 100 terabytes chemically/biologically (specifying how strongly different neurons are linked by synapses). Comparing these numbers with the machine memories shows that the world’s best computers can now out-remember any biological system—at a cost that’s rapidly dropping and was a few thousand dollars in 2016.
”
”
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
Your brain contains about as many neurons as there are stars in our Galaxy: in the ballpark of a hundred billion. On average, each of these neurons is connected to about a thousand others via junctions called synapses, and it’s the strengths of these roughly hundred trillion synapse connections that encode most of the information in your brain.
”
”
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
Outlandish subsidies for multimillionaires isn't a phenomenon seen only in Detroit. Michigan gives away 30 cents of every government dollars to private companies. And in other cities, stadiums and ballparks are routinely paid for by governments, all with the hope that they'll help stimulate revitalization, even though economists nearly unanimously agree that spending public funds on private stadiums is one of the least efficient ways for governments to spend money. But the strategy is perhaps particularly troubling in a city where garbage collection, street repair, and streetlights are considered privileges.
”
”
P.E. Moskowitz (How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood)
“
security chief said. “But we’ll take it from here. Why don’t you go enjoy the game? I’ll meet you in the pressroom afterward and give you an update.” Mike and Kate went to their seats. The Yankees were behind by two runs. With all the excitement, the cousins
”
”
David A. Kelly (The Pinstripe Ghost (Ballpark Mysteries #2))
“
contract. To get around this problem, the manager of the Orioles, Jack Dunn, adopted George and became his legal guardian. Young George’s relationship with Dunn led to him being given his famous name. One day Dunn brought George to the ballpark to show him the ropes. When the other players saw the new player, one remarked, “Well, here’s Jack’s newest babe.” Soon, all his teammates were calling him Babe.
”
”
Tony Castro (Gehrig and the Babe: The Friendship and the Feud)
“
Let’s go back to what happened at the ballpark,” I said, “because I’m still not getting it.”
He sighed. “Look, he tells me he’s got a thing for you. I back off. He gets you. And now he’s making moves on Tiffany. What’s up with that? I know you like him. He’s a nine point five and I’m a six--”
“No!” I reached out, covered his hand with mine.
“Dani, I saw your roster that night at Ben and Jerry’s, when it fell out of your bag. I unfolded it, shouldn’t have, but I did. I saw the hottie scores--”
“No. I mean, yes, I gave you a six, but I did it because I wanted to give you a ten.”
He shook his head. “That makes no sense.”
“I was trying to convince myself you weren’t a ten, because it’s a lot harder living with a guy you’re attracted to than it is living with one you’re not.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You gave me a six because you liked me, and you thought it would make you stop liking me?”
“I thought it would be weird liking a guy who was living in my house. And I sorta promised Mom I wouldn’t do that. Really like the guy who was living here. Only I do.
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
For the briefest of seconds, it was like he looked back into the stands, like maybe he spotted me, shaking my rattle, giving him all the encouragement I could. I could have sworn I saw a corner of his mouth curl up. Then he did the whole Velcro batting glove thing and stepped up to the plate.
The pitch came.
He swung.
Crack!
He hit it! He hit it! I jumped up and started shouting.
I had a second to see the stunned look on his face, like maybe he’d never hit the ball before, but that couldn’t be…
And then I realized what it was. As he started running, he turned his head, his gaze following the ball…
The ball that went out of the ballpark!
Right over the Backyard Mania billboard!
Home run!
My boyfriend had hit a home run!
”
”
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
“
At Xanadu in 2001, I asked Kilgore Trout for his ballpark opinion of John Wilkes Booth. He said Booth’s performance in Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., on the night of Good Friday, April 14th, 1865, when he shot Lincoln and then jumped from a theater box to the stage, breaking his leg, was “the sort of thing which is bound to happen whenever an actor creates his own material.
”
”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Timequake)
“
he “went under the grass quilt on us.” I may be so far off base as to be out of the ballpark, but with “sinflute and dropped him” I hear an echo of, or at least the meter of, the Duke of Wellington’s order for the last charge at Waterloo, “Up guards and at ‘em!
”
”
Bill Cole Cliett (A "Finnegans Wake" Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary)
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Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark.
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Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
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Subway Series is a series of baseball games between two New York City teams, since fans can reach the stadiums via subway trains. The first Subway Series were played as World Series games. For example, the Yankees played the New York Giants in 1921, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941. More recently, the Mets and the Yankees have been playing Subway Series games during the regular season. They typically play groups of two or three games at each team’s stadium. The Mets and the Yankees competed in a World Series Subway Series in 2000, and the Yankees won in five games.
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David A. Kelly (Subway Series Surprise (Ballpark Mysteries Super Special, #3))
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the Cubs would never win another World Series because they weren’t nice to his goat!
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David A. Kelly (The World Series Curse (Ballpark Mysteries Super Special #1))
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As Yogi Berra said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?
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Paul Levine (Early Grave (Jake Lassiter #14))
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The 'usual' consensus on the four canonical Gospels is that Mark was written around 70, Matthew around 80, Luke around 90, and John around 100.21 Those are all arbitrary ballpark figures, which don't really have much basis in fact. Of course, fundamentalists want all those dates to be earlier, whi le many well-informed experts are certain they are later, and I find the arguments of the latter more persuasive, if inconclusive. As to authorship, none of the Gospels was written by the person they were named after, or in fact by any known person. We know they were not written by the disciples of Jesus or anyone who knew Jesus. The titles of the Gospels conspicuously assign them as 'according to' the names given (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John), which designation in Greek was not used to name the author of a work, but its source, the person from whom the information was received or learned.
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Richard C. Carrier (On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt)
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This driving desire is not the absence of a thing, but a thing in itself. It is a burning, lustful, joyous desire to prey upon, dominate, and then inflict as much fear and pain as possible. We just don’t seem to have a word for it. Cruelty partially fits, sadism comes close, the German word schadenfreude (taking delight in the suffering of others) is in the ballpark, but there isn’t a term I am aware of that accurately describes what compels these people to do what they do. I believe in science, but the farther you go back in the historical record, the more you encounter a simple word, religious in origin, that may most accurately summarize the mindset of true serial killers. It seems to fit better than anything else: evil.
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Matt Murphy (The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death)
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but a thing in itself. It is a burning, lustful, joyous desire to prey upon, dominate, and then inflict as much fear and pain as possible. We just don’t seem to have a word for it. Cruelty partially fits, sadism comes close, the German word schadenfreude (taking delight in the suffering of others) is in the ballpark, but there isn’t a term I am aware of that accurately describes what compels these people to do what they do. I believe in science, but the farther you go back in the historical record, the more you encounter a simple word, religious in origin, that may most accurately summarize the mindset of true serial killers. It seems to fit better than anything else: evil.
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Matt Murphy (The Book of Murder: A Prosecutor's Journey Through Love and Death)
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What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I’ll feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I’m not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother’s beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished. This isn’t to say we can’t or shouldn’t transcend our inheritance, only that it is our inheritance; whatever else may be gained by giving up meat, this much at least is lost. The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality. (This is one of the odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way.) Not that the sacrifice of our animality is necessarily regrettable; no one regrets our giving up raping and pillaging, also part of our inheritance. But we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token we might call sex—also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—a mere recreational preference. Rather, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
David A. Kelly (The San Francisco Splash (Ballpark Mysteries, #7))
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Theology gets us to the ballpark; memorized Scripture, into the clubhouse.
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David Mathis (Habits of Grace: Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines)
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After they left, Emma returned to her Jasper-burger consumption with gusto. She’d asked Lisa once to find out the recipe for their seasoning mix, but Kevin wouldn’t give it up. Plus, as Lisa had pointed out, it wouldn’t do Emma any good to have it since she couldn’t cook worth a damn, anyway.
“So about what I said before,” Sean said after he’d wolfed down his food, “about not wanting them to know we’ve had sex. It’s not that I’m trying to hide it, I just…”
“Don’t want them to know.”
“Yeah.”
“That makes sense.”
His face brightened. “Really?”
“No.”
“Damn.” He’d finished his beer, so he took a swig off the glass of water she’d requested with her meal.
“Under normal circumstances, I’d want everybody to know we’re sleeping together. Trust me. I’d put a sign on my front lawn.”
“But these aren’t normal circumstances.”
“Not even in the ballpark. I have this bet with my brothers I’d last the whole month and I don’t want to listen to them gloat.” Of course he’d have a bet with his brothers. Such a guy thing to do. “But it’s more about the women.”
“The women?”
“In my family, I mean. Aunt Mary, especially. They might start thinking it’s more than it is. Getting ideas about us, if you know what I mean.”
Emma ate her last French fry and pushed her plate away. “So we have to pretend we’re madly in love and engaged…while pretending we’re not having sex.”
“Told you it complicates things.”
“I’m going to need a color-coded chart to keep track of who thinks what.”
He grinned and pulled his Sharpie out of his pocket. “I could make Sticky notes.”
The man loved sticky notes. He stuck them on everything. A note on the front of the microwave complaining about the disappearance of the last bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. (Emma had discovered during a particularly rough self-pity party that any chips will do, even if they burn your tongue.) A note on the back of the toilet lid telling her she used girlie toilet paper, whatever that meant.
He liked leaving them on the bathroom mirror, too. Stop cleaning my sneakers. I’m trying to break them in. Her personal favorite was If you buy that cheap beer because it’s on sale again, I’ll piss in your mulch pile. But sometimes they were sweet. Thank you for doing my laundry. And…You make really good grilled cheese sandwiches. That one had almost made her cry.
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Shannon Stacey (Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3))
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Brother John and I had our ears glued to the radio. It was a Sunday afternoon in early December 1941, and our football Giants were getting pounded by the Brooklyn Dodgers, an NFL team that played from 1930 to 1943 in Ebbets Field, a faraway ballpark I’d never seen. So far as I was concerned, Brooklyn was on the other side of the moon. The Polo
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Ralph Branca (A Moment in Time: An American Story of Baseball, Heartbreak, and Grace)
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Cubs fans can expect a new feel to the ballpark, one that will be more modern, informative and entertaining — but also one that has left some fans fearful Wrigley will lose its charm.
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Anonymous
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Henry had bought a Phillies hat as we'd gotten off the subway at Broad and had tucked his substantial ponytail over the adjustable strap in the back. He could have been from Philadelphia; he could have been a very large Indian from Philadelphia, but he could have been from Philadelphia. I was blending in even better. I had left my hat at the hospital on Lena Moretti's head, had purchased a natty fitted cap and a vast red-satin jacket from the Broad Street vendo, and now approached the major league ballpark looking like a British phone box.
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Craig Johnson
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If you’re an endomorph or you want to accelerate fat loss, decrease the carbs, and increase the protein (40% carbs, 40% protein, and 20% fat is super-popular among fitness models and physique athletes). Using nutrition tracking spreadsheets or software makes calculating your macronutrient ratios a cinch! But if you make sure to eat a lean protein, a fibrous vegetable, and a natural starchy carb with every meal, your numbers will be in the ballpark, automatically!
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Tom Venuto (Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle: Transform Your Body Forever Using the Secrets of the Leanest People in the World)
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Indians love baseball,” jokes Charlie Hill, “but we don’t set up camp in the ballpark! Hey, if the Atlanta Braves think that using Indians as mascots is simply harmless fun, then why not have them dress up some white guy in a three-piece suit and have him shuffle around a mobile home parked in the middle of the outfield every time their team scores a hit? Or how about changing the names of a few of these sports teams? Why not have the Atlanta White Boys or the Kansas City Caucasians or the Chicago Negroes, the Washington Jews or New York Rednecks?” My
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MariJo Moore (Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (Nation Books))
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The Sausage Race Every ballpark in the big leagues has its unique traditions, but only Miller Park has the sausage race. In the sixth inning of every game, five young (and really fast) Brewers employees (or friends of employees) dress in sausage costumes and race around the warning track.
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Bill Schroeder (If These Walls Could Talk: Milwaukee Brewers: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box)
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When Larrea arrives at the ballpark, he begins working on players’ complimentary tickets. All big league players and coaches submit their ticket requests into a computer system that tracks all the complimentary tickets used throughout the year on a per-game basis. They did that a few years ago that for taxation purposes. At most ballparks the visiting team receives between 220 and 250 tickets for players and traveling staff. Roughly half of those seats, though, are in the upper deck. Some teams like the Dodgers can make things difficult on Larrea by giving tickets in strange configurations (i.e. one in front, three behind).
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Bill Schroeder (If These Walls Could Talk: Milwaukee Brewers: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box)
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Men go to the ballpark with an assumed knowledge and interest, whereas women need to constantly demonstrate how much they know and care.
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Stacey May Fowles (Baseball Life Advice)
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I suppose in antique Marxist terms we are lavishly paid because we are perfect tools for the class even higher up, those who own the ballpark. You can occasionally have some sympathy for those frequently unhappy souls with big inheritances from birth. This was fate in which the sense of victimization is always possible. But my own class is undeserving of a mote, a mite, a filament, an iota of sympathy. We are self-made barkers, toy dogs, prime weenies.
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Jim Harrison (The Beast God Forgot to Invent)
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DADDIE sat looking at the semi-transparent Karl. Finally, he said, “How are you here? Wait, this makes no sense. I’m at the ballpark.”
“Think back. What do you remember before you were here?” Karl asked.
“Mommy, Merlyna, Josie, and I were talking. Merlyna stormed out, and then Mommy just disappeared…” DADDIE said, “Geez, Karl, I’m scared.”
“Don’t be. That’s why I am here,” said Karl.
“What happens if I don’t make it,” DADDIE asked.
“The colony will most assuredly die, Daddy. They all need you.”
“I meant what will happen to me… Will I dream?” DADDIE asked, his avatar looking afraid.
“I don’t know. I barely have any understanding of what will happen to us organics when we die, and most of what I believe is like voodoo and shamanism to other humans these days. I believe that all sentient life will awaken in a new, perfected universe. I think that will include AIs like you, too. But I do know that you don’t have to go gently into the night. You can fight back like you always do. Don’t give up the game when you’re so close to winning,” Karl said.
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Eric Holtgrefe (Innocence Lost: Book One of The Corpus Ad Astra Adventure)
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of St. Louis airplane and lots of rockets. They even got to touch a real moon rock!
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David A. Kelly (The Capital Catch (Ballpark Mysteries #13))
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Until quite recently, we did not have even a ballpark estimate of the number of Natives held in bondage. Since Indian slavery was largely illegal, its victims toiled, quite literally, in dark corners and behind locked doors, giving us the impression that they were fewer than they actually were. Because Indian slaves did not have to cross an ocean, no ship manifests or port records exist, but only vague references to slaving raids.
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Andrés Reséndez (The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America)
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Figure Out Why They Won't Respond People are damned contrary creatures! You present them with a perfectly good offer and they still don't respond — why not? I think it was Yogi Berra who said something along the lines of, “When people don't want to come to the ballpark, there ain't nothing that can keep 'em from not coming.
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Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
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Constance Avenue, had such a sweet swing from the left side of the plate. Outside the ballparks, America was in the midst of a massive and uncertain shift. The Kennedys were dead. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed standing on a balcony in Memphis, setting off riots across the country, including in Chicago. The 1968 Democratic National
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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When confronted with naming your terms or price, counter by recalling a similar deal which establishes your “ballpark,” albeit the best possible ballpark you wish to be in. Instead of saying, “I’m worth $110,000,” Jerry might have said, “At top places like X Corp., people in this job get between $130,000 and $170,000.” That gets your point across without moving the other party into a defensive position. And it gets him thinking at higher levels. Research shows that people who hear extreme anchors unconsciously adjust their expectations in the direction of the opening number.
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Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It)
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one man asked his friend, 'So how is her figure?', to which the reply was, 'Ballpark'.
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J.S. Mason (A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites)
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white space helmet. His breathing echoed in his ears. He saw a spacecraft from the corner
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David A. Kelly (The Astro Outlaw (Ballpark Mysteries, #4))
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the game’s fan base after the strike of 1994 that had cancelled the World Series—latched on to the home run as a marketing tool. Fans liked it, and if steroids helped fuel the home-run frenzy, so be it. The tacit sanctioning of steroids upset La Russa and other managers and coaches, and their unease wasn’t simply altruistic. Throughout the 1990s, several innovations had gradually shifted the game in the hitters’ favor: a lowered mound, added expansion teams (which enlarged and diluted the pool of pitching talent), new teacup-sized ballparks, a tighter strike zone. Add steroids to the list, because they gave strength to drive balls farther, and it was like “piling on,
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Buzz Bissinger (Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager)
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Nancy Pelosi trailed the president as he circled the ballpark, then perched herself in the stands. As she watched Biden enjoy himself with abandon, her phone rang. It was Joe Manchin. Despite the noise of the crowd—and the fact there were cameras all around her—she went to work. “We have got to get this done, Joe.” Manchin wasn’t having it. “I don’t believe in entitlements,” he told her. Pelosi started to grow aggravated, but this wasn’t the time or place for either having a philosophical debate about the role of government or brokering a deal. She was shouting to make herself heard. To all the world, it looked as if she were chewing out whoever was on the other side of the conversation.
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Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
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The Earwood family was special to me then. They are still special to me now. I suppose that we all have those too-brief relationships, where we can’t help but think back and wonder how much different it might have been if the timeline of our lives had run more parallel instead heading off into a hundred different directions like the rails in that train yard. But that doesn’t make me any less thankful for the one spot where they intersected.
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Ryan McGee (Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer at the Perfect Ballpark at the Perfect Time)
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As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?” You won’t guess it exactly, but you’ll be much more likely to be in the ballpark. As Epstein writes, “None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer.
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A.J. Jacobs (The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life)
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The crucial issue when a subsidy is proposed is the impact on the finances of the local government, known as fiscal impact. Unless the annual flows of tax revenues more than pay for the bonds being issued, then some other part of the municipal budget will suffer. Even then it will probably suffer because people’s budgets for recreation are limited. A dollar spent at the ballpark is a dollar not spent at a restaurant, bar, or other place of leisure time activity, thus transferring the jobs and economic effects from many businesses to a single sports team.
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David Cay Johnston (Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill))
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What do ghosts serve for
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David A. Kelly (The Pinstripe Ghost (Ballpark Mysteries #2))
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Neil Reynolds was one of the best persons who ever went through that place down there," J.K. reflected when he spoke to me two decades later.
"We liked him a great deal," interjected J.K.'s son Jim.
"The guy had great talent, great vision," J.K. added. "Mr. Reynolds hit the ball out of the ballpark."
In August of 1994, Neil Reynolds was fired.
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Jacques Poitras (Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires and the Stories They Won't Tell)
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it’s difficult to put words around an experience that is deeply personal and intuitive. But in general, you’re in the right ballpark if you sense your aim as “to be totally open to God.” Totally available, all the way down to that innermost point of your being; deeper than your thinking, deeper than your feelings, deeper than your memories and desires, deeper than your usual psychological sense of yourself—even deeper than your presence! For ultimately, what will go on in this prayer is “in secret
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Cynthia Bourgeault (Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening)
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Kissing Lili Belle is devouring an ice cream cone in July; it is a hotdog at the ballpark; it is Jean Harlow slipping into something more comfortable and it is better than all of those things. Kissing Lili Belle is better than the movies.
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Heather Babcock (Filthy Sugar)
David A. Kelly (The Pinstripe Ghost (Ballpark Mysteries #2))
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Travelers typically lost around 1 or 2 percent when they exchanged paper money, in the same ballpark as the fee I pay today when I can’t get to my bank and have to use another bank’s ATM. Also, the historians found, there weren’t actually that many shady banks.
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Jacob Goldstein (Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing)
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Only once has the answer been in the ballpark of “We didn’t think X would be valuable.” (It was phrased as “We were worried X’s strong views would steer the conversation off course.”)
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Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
David A. Kelly (Subway Series Surprise (Ballpark Mysteries Super Special, #3))
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When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games that he did not physically attend by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would creep out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind’s eye: “The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter’s box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate,” and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of graphical user interfaces in general.
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Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning...Was the Command Line)
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..., like the pharmaceutical industry's hypocrisy. They want people to think their motivation is for the public good when they are, in fact, poster boys for capitalism run amok."
"You mean how they justify their out-of-the-ballpark prices supposedly because of how much money they have to spend on research."
"The reality is that they spend more money on advertising prescription drugs directly to the public than they spend on research. And that doesn't even include the money they spend on lobbyists and politicians.
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Robin Cook (Host)