That is fuckin’ awesome. I mean fuckin’ awesome. I fuckin’ mean fucking awesome. You are one Big Swinging Dick, and don’t ever let anybody tell you different.” It brought tears to my eyes to hear...

That’s what happens when you’re thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do...

A man got to have a code. – Omar Little

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don’t need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

The author refers to a player’s affected nonchalance and comments he is, “too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.

You invite a few players in to start a game of Texas Hold’em by telling them that the deck doesn’t have any jacks or queens in it and that you won’t tell the other people...

Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow...

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as...

Years later he would say that when he’d decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he’d done something just for the money, and that he’d never do something just for...

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws—if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit, the dollar will eventually plummet—but in the short run money flows less rationally....

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect...

Jules Tygiel’s Past Time: Baseball As History

There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble’s inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud…. The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold...

That’s easy. Strauss wouldn’t stoop to use the men’s room on the trading floor. He’d go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other...

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

Holding one’s self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the...

If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it’s amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby....

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources...

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the...

…a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head...