" When baseball is bread and butter, you never question a man’s eccentricities as long as he continues to carry his weight and can hoist one into Railroad Street outside the park, when blue chips are down. I’m trying to give you a picture of those Yanks, and of Lou. And I am also trying to give you an unnamby-pamby picture of baseball as it is, or at least as it was in those days. It isn’t a game played for the sweet joy of sport by Sunday School book characters, but a rough, competitive game played as a profession and a business by a bunch of tough, hard bitted men who were and are just like any other groups of men. In a group of twenty or thirty players you find all kinds. That Lou Gehrig was an ascetic, practically, in his manner of living, was purely a matter of his own personal choice. No one actually demanded it of him. "

― Paul Gallico ,