“There was a void there,” Richard Washington said. “ UCLA had been vanquished. We wanted to show everybody what we could do.”

“He prepared me for anything and everything I could possibly face over the course of my career,” Eric Davis said of Dave Parker. “I was able to talk to him firsthand about the racism in the game.

Billionaire Steve Cohen beat Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez, two other billionaires, and Mayor Bill de Blasio to acquire baseball's favorite underdog. His end goal was never in doubt: “He’s obsessed with coming out on top."

“I’m in a position where I have to play well or I won’t get to play,” Votto said. “You take it for granted. I’ve taken it for granted almost my entire career, and all of a sudden I had a rough year. I have to show again. I have to perform.”

“The election of Nixon would be death to the blacks,” Robinson said.

...having been spared President Trump’s tweetstorms, baseball found itself once again offstage, happily content to stay away from bigger conversations about race and social justice, about the real meaning of American sports in America.

Of course, nothing could rattle Bob Gibson. One comment, though, in particular worked on him: the words in a Boston paper announcing Dick Williams’s plans for the seventh game—“Lonborg and Champagne.” Watching Gibson studying those words, his teammate Joe Hoerner knew how much they would fortify Gibson’s resolve. It wasn’t that he needed any extra motivation to win his fifth consecutive World Series game, but that smug headline, combined with the perceived slight at breakfast, would bolster Gibson’s belief that he needed to prove to the world that he was capable of anything.

“It got to a point where even seeing a grown man in his mid-30s wearing a jersey with some other name on the back struck me as immature and odd,” Rob Jordan said. “You say, ‘Come on man, grow up.’”

“The first time I saw Joe Namath was after a waitress in this dining room of this Tuscaloosa hotel, a red haired waitress who was young in a tight blue uniform and left nothing to the imagination, to my imagination or hers,” the 83-year-old Talese recited, "this waitress who spotted him coming in the door and she said to another, ‘Psst, here he comes.’”