A chart of numbers that would put an actuary to sleep can be made to dance if you put it on one side of a card and Bombo Rivera’s picture on the other.
Television is full of fictional and real violence that’s turned into entertainment. It’s an interesting phenomena and I tried to put it in perspective and tried to think through a few of the real questions that this sometimes unseemly business raises.
Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason – because some people like them. It’s the same with baseball statistics.
I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.
It’s extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.
I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!
Any of us are capable of doing things we’re not proud of under the wrong kind of stresses.
Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.
Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.
Crime stories show us the part of people’s lives they try to keep hidden.
Do people really believe there’s something different about the eyes of murderers?
Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.
I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.
I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.
In a crime story, the details become tremendously important – where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.
It’s easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.
Television is full of fictional and real violence that’s turned into entertainment.
If you can’t learn to do something well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
The search for understanding, wherever it roams, is a search for better simplifications. Simplifications which explain more and distort less... All human understanding is based on simplifications of more complex realities.
He was called “Pancho” because people at that time didn’t have enough sense to be offended by stuff like that.
What happens in many of these cases is that, in the absence of evidence, the crime is pinned on a person of low social standing who is known to be in the vicinity of the crime. We have seen this repeatedly.