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21 " field directorship because the Philadelphia front office "
― Roger Angell , The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket
22 " The feeling of letdown, of puzzled astonishment, persists, particularly in this neighborhood, where we have come to expect a more lavish and satisfactory autumnal show from our hosts, the Yankees, the rich family up on the hill. There has been a good deal of unpleasant chatter (“I always knew they were really cheap,” “What else can you expect from such stuckups?”) about the affair ever since, thus proving again that prolonged success does not beget loyalty. "
― Roger Angell , The Summer Game
23 " Davis, a lifetime .300 hitter who twice won the National League batting title, came over to the White Sox from the Mets in a major trade last winter (“Mets ckoo!”), "
24 " Morning training sessions at Chain-O’-Lakes Stadium, in Winter Haven, were studied with a mixture of excessive optimism and unjustified despondency by the immense Boston press corps, which has traditionally been made uneasy by success. "
25 " There is something wrong here—too little day-to-day opposition, perhaps a tiny lack of pride, perhaps a trace of moneyed smugness. Whatever it is, it probably explains this year’s collapse and makes it certain that this Yankee team cannot be compared to the Ruffing-Gehrig-Dickey teams of the nineteen-thirties or the DiMaggio-Henrich-Rizzuto Yanks of the nineteen-forties and fifties. What made those Yankee teams so fearsome, so admirable, so hated was typified by the death-ray scowl that Allie Reynolds, their ace right-handed pitcher a decade ago, used to aim at an enemy slugger stepping into the box in a crucial game. "
26 " Bob Allison fouled one, took two balls, swung and missed, swung and missed, and winter descended on the northlands. "
27 " Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world’s champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy. "
28 " Collectively, the Mets are still both too young and too old to afford any but the most modest ambitions, but I think the time has arrived when they can look at each other with something other than pure embarrassment. "
29 " Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark. "
30 " There is something about a martini, A tingle remarkably pleasant; A yellow, a mellow martini; I wish I had one at present. There is something about a martini Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, It is not the vermouth— I think that perhaps it’s the gin. "
― Roger Angell , Let Me Finish
31 " They booed Jay lightly; they didn’t mind seeing him suffer a little—not with that $27,500 salary he won after a holdout this spring. They applauded Koufax, the Dodger pitcher, who was working easily and impressively, mixing fast balls and curves and an occasional changeup, pitching in and out to the batters, and hitting the corners. Koufax looked almost ready for opening day. "
32 " And not even a latter-day O. Henry would risk a conte like the true, electrifying history of a pitcher named Pete Jablonowski, who disappeared from the Yankees in 1933 after several seasons of inept relief work with various clubs. Presumably disheartened by seeing the losing pitcher listed as “J’bl’n’s’i” in the box scores of his day, he changed his name to Pete Appleton in the semi-privacy of the minors, and came back to win fourteen games for the Senators in 1936 and to continue in the majors for another decade. "
33 " Back at Sarasota the next day, the White Sox managed some less fidgety fielding and beat the Tigers, 3–1. Among the spectators was a pathetic little band of Detroit sportswriters, utterly orphaned by the five-month-old newspaper strike in their home town. The only consolation for their plight that I could think of was that it might spare them the embarrassment of once again having to predict a pennant for the Tigers, a team endowed with muscular batters, fine pitchers, and habitual late-summer neurasthenia "
34 " Big-league ball on the west coast of Florida is a spring sport played by the young for the divertissement of the elderly—a sun-warmed, sleepy exhibition celebrating the juvenescence of the year and the senescence of the fans. "