If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of storytelling over mere statistics in understanding sports and players.
Vin Scully's quote emphasizes the value of personal narratives in sports, suggesting that numbers and statistics, while important, cannot capture the true essence of a player. The stories behind the statistics provide depth and meaning, transforming the way we understand the players and their journeys in the sport.
In practice
Mentioning this quote during a sports analysis to highlight the importance of personal stories over numbers.
The game is just one long conversation, and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like 'Did you know that?' or 'You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up.
That really is my trademark. Day to day, week in, week out. If something happens and the crowd roars, I shut up.
Don't let the winds blow your dreams away... or steal your faith in God.
As long as you live keep smiling because it brightens everybody's day.
In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened…
Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.
There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.
By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. . . . I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English; I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.
I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
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