The League Commissioner Quotes

As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (“Bud”) Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A’s success “an aberration,” but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how’d they do it? What was their secret?

... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.

In a phrase widely attributed to some early Zionists, and before them Christian Restorationists, Palestine was “for a people without a land, a land without people.” Herbert Samuel, a British Jewish liberal who served as the first high commissioner of the Mandatory government in Palestine, presented an interim report to the League of Nations in the summer of 1921, a year after his arrival, in which he described a country “exhausted by war” that was “under-developed and under-populated.” Though he may not have been entirely impartial, he depicted Palestine as a kind of wasteland where the townspeople were “in severe distress,” cultivated land was left untilled, woodlands had almost disappeared, and orange groves were parched and in ruins.