Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true;… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
