“Drunk on sports all over again, just like a seven-year old in New Jersey whose mom has just bought him two packs of baseball cards for ten cents.”

“Caroline's about to say something really harsh, but suddenly Hunter and Dev launch into a fucking Green Day cover, and we're all seven years old again and dancing like we spit out the Ritalin while Mom wasn't looking.”

“It never failed—I'd buy a new journal, write like a madwoman for ten pages, then lose total interest in the process. Three months later, I'd start the whole process all over again. I think I just liked buying new notebooks.”

“Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.”

“I don't have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.”

“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.”