Baseball Batter Quotes

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

Here’s the thing about baseball-it’s not the individual sport I thought it was. Turns out I was wrong about that. Yeah, the batter is a lone man against the world. He stands in the batter’s box like a soldier and it’s up to him-and him alone-what happens next. But here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I was forced to, until recently: In order to hit a home run… Someone else has to pitch the ball.

Woman and children behind the lines!' he yelled, and all the girls jumped. Henry froze with his mouth open. 'Bang the drum slowly and ask not for whom the bell's ringing, for the answer's unfriendly!' He threw a fist in the air. 'Two years have my black ships sat before Troy, and today its gate shall open before the strength of my arm.' Dotty was laughing from the kitchen. Frank looked at his nephew. 'Henry, we play baseball tomorrow. Today we sack cities. Dots! Fetch me my tools! Down with the French! Once more into the breach, and fill the wall with our coward dead! Half a league! Half a league! Hey, batter, batter!' Frank brought his fist down onto the table, spilling Anastasia's milk, and then he struck a pose with both arms above his head and his chin on his chest. The girls cheered and applauded. Aunt Dotty stepped back into the dining room carrying a red metal toolbox.

My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said "Batter up,"I didn't argue that I wasn't ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.

Why? Why should the bond between a people and their baseball team be so intense? Fenway Park is a part of it, offering a physical continuum to the bond, not only because Papi can stand in the same batter's box as Teddy Ballgame, but also because a son might sit in the same wooden-slat seat as his father.

Ted Williams hit 17 career grand slams. He is the toughest batter to get out in major league history. It was never fun for opposing pitchers to have to face him, but that was never more true than it was when there was nowhere to put him—and his grand slam total is only one of the many franchise records that he owns.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.

Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered “hit by pitch,” and would be eligible to advance to first base.

Today a pitcher gets fined if the umpire thinks he threw at a batter. In the olden days, the umpire didn't have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you.

Since 2008, batters have hit only .175 against pitches thrown at 100 m.p.h. or above. Batting averages go up as the speed of the pitches goes down: .210 at 99, .213 at 98, .225 at 97, .242 at 96 and .252 at 95.

Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse--these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer desire. But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric--not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus picture, field verses ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat. And the ball.

It was like the baseball gods were showing off just for him, in honor of his first day of big league baseball. And surely the baseball gods were smiling that day, because the next batter was Larry Brown, and he was a scrawny, scrappy 23-year-old kid who’d never hit a big league home run. And yet he stepped to the plate and became just the second player in baseball history to connect and give his team four consecutive home runs.

Scrambling to his feet, he saw Amber in her vampire gown rushing toward him. He felt her long nails rip down his cheek as he sidestepped and swung the bat with all his might. Her pale face exploded as the side of her head caved in from the blow. He saw the fury in her remaining eye as she struggled to her feet with her bloody claws groping. A vicious downward swipe took out the other eye, and she crumpled in a bloody heap at his feet. With his adrenalin flowing like a river through his sinews, he caught the first wolf in midair with a bone crushing upward thrust as the beast’s gnashing grisly teeth opened to grip his throat in a death lock. When he looked down at the wolf’s battered head, he saw the open eyes of his son Kyle staring up at him. The horror of the son’s face startled him awake. The forest and the monsters had disappeared. He found himself in the upstairs hall of his home on Loving Forest Court amid the twisted, battered remains of his wife and children still swinging the bloody, baseball bat.

Paul Henry Carr of Checotah, Oklahoma, proud member of the Future Farmers of America, football and baseball letterman, brother to eight sisters, only son of Thomas and Minnie Mae Carr, died there on the deck of his battered, broken warship.

Q. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? —Ellen McManis Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics. A. The answer turns out to be “a lot of things,” and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I

I’m sorry. I know how much players have to focus, and I know not to be a distraction. I just got caught up in the moment, in the great game, in your terrific pitching.” But I felt a need to explain more. “Look, Jason, I love baseball. I love the crack of the bat hitting the ball. I love the seventh-inning stretch and singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ I love eating hot dogs and standing for the singing of the national anthem. I love doing the wave. I love Kiss Cam. I love that the game isn’t over until it’s over. “I love the thrill of a home run and the disappointment of an out at first. I love the way a batter stands at the plate and the catcher readies himself to receive the pitch. I love watching the pitcher windup. I love sitting in the stands and feeling like I’m part of the game. “And tonight, watching you pitch, I forgot that I’m only a small part—the spectator. Watching you, I felt like I was in the game, out on that field with you. You’re out there on the mound, living a dream that so few people ever experience. “I’m sorry, sorry that tonight I ruined the moment for you.” He was staring at me intently. I’d just bared my soul. Why didn’t he speak? What could he possibly be thinking? My nerves stretched taut. “Say something,” I demanded. “There’s nothing else to say,” he said in that quiet way he had. Then he lowered his head and kissed me.

Throwing is hard.1 In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone. To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto. But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

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.

American Baseball It's for real, not for practice, and it's televised, not secret, the way you'd expect a civilized country to handle delicate things, it's in color, it's happening now in Florida, "This Is American Baseball" the announcer announces as the batter enters the box, we are watching, and it could be either of us standing there waiting for the pitch, avoiding the eye of the pitcher as we take a few practice cuts, turning to him and his tiny friends in the outfield, facing the situation, knowing that someone behind our backs is making terrible gestures, standing there to swing and miss the way I miss you, wanting to be out of uniform, out of breath, in your car, in love again, learning all the signals for the first time, they way we learned the rules of night baseball as high-school freshman: first base, you kiss her, second base, her breasts, third, you're in her pants, and home is where the heart wants to be all the time, but seldom can reach past the obstacle course of space, the home in our perfect future we wanted so badly, and want more than ever since we learned we won't live there, which happens to lovers in civilized countries all the time, and happens too in American baseball when you strike out and remember what the game really meant.

I’m sorry. I know how much players have to focus, and I know not to be a distraction. I just got caught up in the moment, in the great game, in your terrific pitching.” But I felt a need to explain more. “Look, Jason, I love baseball. I love the crack of the bat hitting the ball. I love the seventh-inning stretch and singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ I love eating hot dogs and standing for the singing of the national anthem. I love doing the wave. I love Kiss Cam. I love that the game isn’t over until it’s over. “I love the thrill of a home run and the disappointment of an out at first. I love the way a batter stands at the plate and the catcher readies himself to receive the pitch. I love watching the pitcher windup. I love sitting in the stands and feeling like I’m part of the game. “And tonight, watching you pitch, I forgot that I’m only a small part--the spectator. Watching you, I felt like I was in the game, out on that field with you. You’re out there on the mound, living a dream that so few people ever experience. “I’m sorry, sorry that tonight I ruined the moment for you.” He was staring at me intently. I’d just bared my soul. Why didn’t he speak? What could he possibly be thinking? My nerves stretched taut. “Say something,” I demanded. “There’s nothing else to say,” he said in that quiet way he had. Then he lowered his head and kissed me.

Only one person can own any plate at a time. It belongs to the pitcher, or it belongs to the batter, Aiken, but not to both. You understand.

She had driven him downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor's seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein's for this trumpet and a new string for his lute. Then he had wandered into the Penny Arcade on Royal Street to see whether any new games had been installed. He had been disappointed to find the miniature mechanical baseball game gone. Perhaps it was only being repaired. The last time he had played it the batter would not work and, after some argument, the management had returned his nickel, even though the Penny Arcade people had been base enough to suggest that Ignatius had himself broken the baseball machine by kicking it.

If a runner is scoring the winning run in a game (because it is the last half of the last inning of the game and his run will put his team ahead), the batter in that play must also touch first base. The batter cannot give up running because he thinks his team has already won.

The foul lines extend through the batter’s box, even though the white chalk lines are not drawn there. If a hit ball bounces within the batter’s box, but inside the imaginary foul lines, it will be a fair ball.

Baseball is a sport of failure. It’s a profession where the most successful batters fail seventy percent of the time and the most successful teams have to endure sixty losses or more each season. To succeed in baseball, you must learn not how to avoid failure, but how to quickly bounce back from it—with optimism and perseverance. That is what positive thinking is all about. It’s about responding to life’s obstacles with a positive, never-back-down attitude. It’s true in baseball. It’s true in life.

The hammer was procured relatively easily, a cheerful older couple from the next boat over happily providing the use of a small toolset in a battered baby-pink bag. The couple watched in a sombre sort of silence while Hoon sat on the top deck, battering four large nails through the thickest part of the baseball bat.

But maybe the best way to describe Votto is that he’s baseball’s most cerebral hitter, the Einstein of the batter’s box.

If there is a man on third and one out, the team should score, on average, .897 runs. What does that mean? That 89.7 percent of the time, the man on third should score? No, not exactly: It means that the run-scoring potential is .897 as a function of there being a man on third and at least two additional batters in the half inning, barring a double play, pickoff, or failed steal attempt. Totaling the run potential of the man on third plus that of the two additional batters, who may get on base themselves, provides the .897. In the case of the first batter, let’s say that no one was on base—then the run potential for the team would be .249 (see the table for the intersection of one out and no one on base). Thus we see that in the situation this batter confronts, .249 of the team’s run value is attributable to the batter’s possibility of reaching base, bringing up not only the next batter but perhaps several more, depending upon the outcomes. This means that of the run value inherent in the situation “man on third, one out” (namely, .897), .249 resides with the batter(s) and .648 with the baserunner. In other words, a runner on third with one out will score, on average, 64.8 percent of the time.

So consciousness is best left uninvited from most of the parties. When it does get included, it’s usually the last one to hear the information. Take hitting a baseball. On August 20, 1974, in a game between the California Angels and the Detroit Tigers, the Guinness Book of World Records clocked Nolan Ryan’s fastball at 100.9 miles per hour (44.7 meters per second). If you work the numbers, you’ll see that Ryan’s pitch departs the mound and crosses home plate, sixty-feet, six inches away, in four-tenths of a second. This gives just enough time for light signals from the baseball to hit the batter’s eye, work through the circuitry of the retina, activate successions of cells along the loopy superhighways of the visual system at the back of the head, cross vast territories to the motor areas, and modify the contraction of the muscles swinging the bat. Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But the surprising part is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second, as we will see in Chapter 2. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it. One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.

the southpaw also struck out 53 percent of the batters he faced. That’s the highest single-season percentage in history,

He found himself in the upstairs hall of his home on Loving Forest Court amid the twisted, battered remains of his wife and children still swinging the bloody, baseball bat.

Know that the only perfect things are a 300 game in bowling and a 27-batter, 27-out game in baseball.

The Tigers, having racked up two second-inning runs off Washburn, sent fifteen men to the plate in the third and tied a famous Series record by scoring ten runs in one inning. Jim Northrup hit a grand-slammer into the right-field bullpen, Kaline and Cash had two hits apiece, the top three Tiger hitters scored six runs, and eight men reached base before the first out was made, and my totals indicated six singles, one homer, four walks, one hit batsman, one sacrifice bunt, four disheartened pitchers, and one bollixed scorecard. This kind of rockslide is not quite the rarity it might seem, and whenever it happens I am left with the impression that all the players involved are mere bystanders at a statistical cataclysm. The batters become progressively more certain that each hit will drop in for them, the fielders less surprised by each unreachable fly or untouchable grounder, the pitchers more and more convinced that their best stuff will be bombed. In the end, there seems nothing to do but wait until the riot exhausts itself and probability can again be placed under the rule of law.

isn’t frowning on the new craze. It’s actively promoting sports gambling with corporate partnerships and in-game graphics broadcast on national television, giving viewers live betting odds of the current batter’s chances of hitting a home run in that very moment. There’s simply too much money in play not to be involved. In 2023, fans in America wagered more than one hundred billion dollars on sports, enough money that they could have pooled their cash to buy the Cincinnati Reds a hundred times over or purchase every single Major League Baseball team—and still have billions of dollars left in their pockets.

Everything within roughly a mile of the park would be leveled, and a firestorm would engulf the surrounding city. The baseball diamond, now a sizable crater, would be centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the back-stop. 6% Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch," and would be eligible to advance to first base.

In daily life, the Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks everywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, a flowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by a truck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—his connection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s daily trajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows that approximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result, baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different.

They were playing the St. Louis Cardinals. Each team had won three games. The seventh game would decide the winner. With half an inning left to play, the score was tied, 3-3. Then the Cardinals batter hit a double. Their man on first ran around the bases toward home plate. Boston’s shortstop fired a relay throw home to get him out. It should have been

But if his speed was a gift of God, his control was the curse of Satan, for Steve Dalkowsky was wilder than a northeast gale. His fastball would explode in the stands - a hundred feet off target - and knock batters out of the on-deck circle. Batboys cowered in the dugout. He gave up more bases on balls in a single season than anyone in the history of the California League, and once in Stockton threw six wild pitches in a row. In Aberdeen one night he struck out seventeen and walked sixteen. "Hey, Dalkowsky, you pitchin' tonight?" a fan yelled after three warm-up pitches missed the screen behind home plate and splintered box seats. Dalkowsky mumbled yes and the fan shouted back, "Then I'm getting the hell out of here, and I'm taking my kids with me.

Morris pitches, as baseball may be the only organized profession in the world where theft is perfectly legal. There are virtually no rules about it. Instead, like suspected cattle rustling, it’s taken care of with an impromptu code of justice much like a batter getting hit by a pitch. It is not tolerated if discovered, and there are some who will resort to the threat of death. But everyone is up for grabs—the pitcher, the catcher, the third-base coach, the first-base coach, the manager, the bench coach—because of a tendency to inadvertently spill secrets.

When the rain delay ended, the Cubs came out looking fresh and hungry. Schwarber raced out to the plate and lashed a single to start things off. The Cubs scored two runs. Cleveland tried to fight back one more time, but this time the comeback fell short. Mike Montgomery was on the mound for Chicago. Michael Martínez was the batter. He chopped a ground ball to third base. “Tough play,” Joe Buck said on television, but third baseman Kris Bryant had no doubts, and he grabbed the ball and threw it across the infield. As he threw, he smiled. That’s the part every Cubs fan remembers. The smile. Martínez was out, the Cubs were champions, and 108 years of sadness, heartbreak, and absurdity came down crashing. And I’ve always wondered: What the heck did Jason Heyward say?

a study that some colleagues and I (RG)18 conducted a few years ago suggests that way pitchers are given advance information about hitters can influence how they handle pressure. It has become common in baseball to give pitchers a “heat map” representing a particular hitter’s batting average for pitch locations throughout the strike zone. While it has been shown that athletes can use this type of information to improve performance,19,20 it also has the potential to change how athletes respond to pressure. The theory of ironic processes21 proposes that pressure will cause a skilled performer to maintain a movement profile typical of an expert but act as though he or she has a different goal: achieving a result that was intentionally avoided (e.g., throwing a pitch into one of a batter’s high average, hot zones). In other words, showing a pitcher where NOT to throw the ball might produce a “don’t think about pink elephants” kind of effect. To test this, we compared pitching performance for two groups: one group that was shown only their target (i.e., a cold zone) and a group was shown the target and an ironic (avoid, hot) zone. Performance was measured in low pressure (just pitching) and high pressure (crowd, monetary incentive for control) conditions. Consistent with the ironic process theory, the two-zone group missed their target more often, but not because they were wild and erratic in their delivery. This occurred because they threw significantly more pitches into the hot zone as compared to when they were not under pressure. Thus, we have two suggestions here. First, advance information should show the goal targets (cold zones) and not include things we want the pitcher to avoid. Second, this type of advance information should be included and manipulated in some practice activities. For example, in the Sniper Challenge described above, pitchers could be given different zones they are trying to target indicated using different types of advance information displays/graphics. This will allow the athlete to get practice at setting their intentions based on this type of information.

It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighs only about 5 ounces, and it made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stiched by hand precisely 216 times. It travels 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher's mound to home--and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise, or fall away. The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousandths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game's greatest heroes. It is played everywhere. In parks and playground and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers fields. By small children and by old men. By raw amateurs and millionare professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game where the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn. Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom. At the games's heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to father and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective. It is a haunted game, where each player is measured by the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.

Rex Stout, creator of orchid-loving detective Nero Wolfe, achieved a new wave of popularity on this amusing series. Axis shortwave broadcasts were monitored by a staff of linguists at the CBS listening station; what were considered the most outrageous lies were then typed into a weekly log of about 30,000 words. Stout would read this, select up to 150 items he found most interesting, and give them to Sue Taylor White (who had given up a job writing soap operas to do war work) for researching. The most entertaining lies, as well as those lending themselves to what Time called Stout’s “lunch-counter sarcasm,” were used on the air. The lies were read rapid-fire by an announcer, often in mock German or Japanese accents, and were just as quickly countered by Stout. When it was claimed that all the best American baseball players were German, Stout’s reply was typical: “They’ve got the facts, no getting away from it. Take the six leading batters in the major leagues—Williams, Gordon, Wright, Reiser, Lombardi, Medwick. Some bunch of Germans. Also the great German prizefighter, Joe Louis.

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.

In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone.

Baseball, however, is the most individual of team sports: In perfectly discernible packets the game reduces to one batter versus one pitcher, with each assuming responsibility for the other, every matchup a still photograph that flipped together form the moving picture we call nine innings.

Dobbiamo imparare dal baseball in quanto donne a "convincere" con forza un maschio tossico a tenere mani e lingua al proprio posto: una mazza da baseball non è utile soltanto a battere con slancio una palla.