The Tenth Inning

-_ As we've industrialized and become more of a scientific society we become more and more an empirical society, more and more a society that seeks to quantify all the the things that we do, and baseball of course lends itself much more to that kind of quantification in performance, than the other sports, because the other sports are very collective in their production. Baseball is collective too in the sense you have a team but you can be a great batter, witness Barry Bonds, for instance, who plays on a very week team and can still be a great batter. You can break all sorts of records by yourself, you don't need to have somebody great batting before you or after you, you can stand out, by yourself. And that happens in baseball. I think in that way is emblematic of the quantification of performance in our society.