Stars and Strikes Quotes

“Things were looking so bleak for the Red Sox that, following their 10th straight loss on May 11, a Boston radio station flew a genuine Salem witch to Cleveland in an attempt to snap the losing streak. Laurie Cabot, a 42-year-old teacher of “Witchcraft as a Science” at Massachusetts’s Salem State College, had been similarly pressed”
― Dan Epstein, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76

“With his bushy mustache and caterpillar eyebrows, Buckner was a dead-ringer for Harry Reems, the porn actor who’d just been convicted in Tennessee in April for conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines, thanks to his appearance in 1972’s massively popular Deep Throat; and just like Reems, Buckner felt he was being prevented from making full professional use of his stick.”
― Dan Epstein, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76

“In the two weeks following the All-Star Game, baseball was largely upstaged by the events of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal, including Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s seven perfect 10.0 scores, Bruce Jenner’s record-setting decathlon triumph, and the five gold medals won by U.S. boxers Howard Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Leonard, Leo Randolph, and brothers Leon and Michael Spinks—the mightiest performance of any American boxing team in Olympic history.”
― Dan Epstein, Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76