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Quotes by Michael Lewis

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
– Michael Lewis
Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
– Michael Lewis
I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.
– Michael Lewis
I spent time in Toronto with the Blue Jays. I spent some time here in Boston with the Red Sox owner, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino. Some time in Texas with people in the Rangers organization. I talked to people in the Seattle organization and scouts from the Mets and the Astros and I spent some time talking to the Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro.
– Michael Lewis
I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?
– Michael Lewis
If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
– Michael Lewis
If you like crafty stuff they are going to open the market for crafty people. When Jaime Moyer of the Seattle Mariners pitches, I love watching him. In a way it is a much more interesting game than watching Randy Johnson pitch. You are not only watching a game you are watching a thought process.
– Michael Lewis
It's a patently unfair game that $40 million has to play against $120 million. It just violates all of our notions of fairness that money is one of the determining factors in the outcome of a sporting contest.
– Michael Lewis
My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
– Michael Lewis
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.
– Michael Lewis
The A's are held to the standard of the Yankees in a funny kind of way. That if they don't win the World Series it is regarded as a failure.
– Michael Lewis
The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects and they feel - they can tell you how baseball screwed up.
– Michael Lewis
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.
– Michael Lewis
The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.
– Michael Lewis
The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
– Michael Lewis
The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.
– Michael Lewis
There are enough books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The minute you write books because you need the income not because you think you have a good subject, you should just stop. There are sixty thousand books published in this country every year, and most of them are crap.
– Michael Lewis
There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.
– Michael Lewis
There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.
– Michael Lewis
There is some wonderful material that ended up on the cutting-room floor because the story is a very focused story. There wasn't room to go into digressions with the Red Sox and the Blue Jays.
– Michael Lewis
Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.
– Michael Lewis
You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.
– Michael Lewis