Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Writers and baseball pitchers

"In Billy Beane's mind, pitchers were nothing like high-performance sports cars, or thoroughbred racehorses, or any other metaphor that implied a cool, inbuilt superiority. They were more like writers. Like writers, pitchers initiated action, and set the tone for their games. They had all sorts of ways of achieving their effects and they needed to be judged by those effects, rather than by their outward appearance, or their technique. To place a premium on velocity for its own sake was like placing a premium on a big vocabulary for its own sake. To say all pitchers should pitch like Nolan Ryan was as absurd as insisting that all writers should write like John Updike."

MONEYBALL, by Michael Lewis.

Moneyball is available at Amazon.com . . .

, , , and hey, look, it's a Brad Pitt movie, too! And shockingly, Hollywood kept the title: Moneyball.