“The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don’t remember batting.” “You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw.” “Henry did? Really? Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Well, it’s always the ones you least suspect.” Owen let his eyes fall shut. “I don’t remember anything at all. Was I reading?” Affenlight nodded. “I warned you. It’s a dangerous pastime.”

“Owen," Henry said excitedly, "I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini."Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. "Really?""Runners on first and second," Rick said. "I bet he wants you to bunt.""What's the bunt sign?""Two tugs on the left earlobe," Henry told him. "But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that's the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether--""Forget it," Owen said. "I'll just bunt.”

“Henry," he said. "You are skilled. I exhort you.”

“Though his classmates supposedly hailed form "all fifty states, Guam, and twenty-two foreign lands," as President Affenlight said in his convocation address, they all seemed to Henry to come from the same close-knit high school, or at least to have attended some crucial orientation session he'd missed. They traveled in large packs, constantly texting the other packs, and when two packs converged there was always a tremendous amount of hugging and kissing on the cheek.”

“There’s so much standing around,’ Owen said when Henry asked him what he liked about the game. ‘And pockets in the uniforms.”

“It might have sounded silly, but Affenlight loved the way Owen always picked these same two mugs and even, presumably, went so far as to rinse them in the sink when they were dirty. Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.”

“Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer--you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine.”