Check this out from Lawrence Wright’s profile of the Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in The New Yorker a couple of months ago (you need to be a subscriber to read the whole article online):
Slim is a man of few pastimes, apart from baseball, which attracts him because of his passion for statistics. His favorite team is the New York Yankees. He can recall obscure statistics, such as Sandy Koufax’s minimum number of strikeouts per inning or the batting averages of the stars of the Negro leagues. Occasionally, he publishes rhapsodic articles about the sport. “The numbers speak on a limitless diamond: of memory, imagination, the making of legends,” he wrote in 1999. “The love of the game has a new beginning; the mind is once again at play.” [emphasis mine, obviously]
He may just be…The Most Interesting Man in the World.
It's probably a little easier for a billionaire to get people to pretend to be interested in the obscure baseball stats he enjoys talking about than it is for everyone else.
Posted by: Brad Templeman | August 21, 2009 at 06:12 PM