“ Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know. ”
The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.
~ Michael Lewis
If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.
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 might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
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 spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.
