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?

Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.

He's a machine for competitive balance, ... Yes, the money is in New York. Yes, the money is in his hands. But he squanders money. Thank God for it.

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.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.