“What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.”

“It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.”

“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?”

“I'm not paying you for the player you used to be, I'm paying you for the player you are right now.”

“The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as fifty-five for men and fifty for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than six hundred Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, writers, musicians, and on and on and on.”

“It was as if this baseball coach had reached inside me, found a rusty switch marked: 'turn on before attempting use' - and flipped it.”

“That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.”