by Roger Kahn.- "You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it." (xii)
- "These adventures helped make plausible the idea of becoming a professional ball player. Ebbets Field was always in reach. There were obstacles - money, the policeman's shoe, a leap, the greasy garageman - but a boy could contend with them and triumph, if he had wit and persistence and a touch of courage. It was easy and absolutely irrational to relate getting to see a Dodger game with getting to be a Dodger. Which, in the fine irrationality of boyhood, is what generations of Brooklyn children did." (22)
