The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

There are several insights at the heart of the A’s system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it’s a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god’s sake don’t go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.

People were paid lots of money to make stupid decisions, people in big banks, and when people are paid to be stupid they'll be stupid. The question was, did they know they were being stupid or were they just stupid? I think you need to take it on a case by case basis. There was some sinister activity, but I think by and by it was people being incentivised to do the wrong thing.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

I always find with my stories that the way they start is that I just get so interested in a person that I'm compelled to go back to them over and over until I learn more and more about them, without even quite thinking it's material for a book.

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?

Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.