Class A Quotes

“Tim doesn’t know about all that. But he does know that Tom knew how lucky these boys are. These ones, he points to the LumberKings on the field trying to warm up, Hank and Sams right in front of us, watching. “Wouldn’t you be them right now if you could?” he asks me. Yes, the answer is yes. If, right now, I was given the chance to drop out of graduate school, tell my girlfriend I would be gone for a while, plan ahead for a five-year cushion of poverty and probable failure into my thirties, I would, without hesitation, abandon any other potential life I’ve worked toward. I would justify it, without a second thought, as the ultimate dream. In the face of such hyperbole, everything else becomes bland and heavy and unnecessary. But just because these players have done what many of us also once wanted to, because they’ve taken ownership of a collective dream, do they deserve to sacrifice for that privilege? The common answer is yes.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The more you care about something, the more you are set up to look foolish. I have tried to live by this basic truth, pushing towards nonchalance and irony. Because there are always others, less invested, who will look at you with withering contempt.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The radioman is the world creator. The radioman interprets moments that almost nobody else sees, and maybe sometimes he invents them. Because everything else is blank. On television, for the fractional percent of announcers who make that leap to the screen, their art becomes ornamentation to the images of the players that everyone cares about and the graphics that can exactly quantify a player's habits, trends, worth. Some of the larger A-ball markets have occasional TV coverage of their games. It's a terrible idea, primarily because it removes the opportunity to imagine beyond the confines of ever-dull reality...It's like watching a recently exhumed video of a child's talent show, the triumph instantly exposed for how small it really was.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“The moment you can be anything else at all, you are not aimed at being great at one thing.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending...But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained.”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

“I read that the term "nostalgia" originated in a seventeenth-century medical student's dissertation, when he mixed the Greek work nostos, "return to the native land," with algos, "suffering, grief," to describe the madness of mercenaries who spent all their lives moving and trying to remember. It was classified as a potentially fatal disease. Isn't that crazy? To die from wanting to return. But I miss things that were never mine, want to return to a place, more of a feeling, that never really existed, and doesn't baseball always promise that there was once something more?”
― Lucas Mann, Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere