Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Baer

“Lefty Grove could throw a lamb chop past a wolf” is sports hyperbole with teeth: a line that flatters an athlete by admitting, with a wink, that language has to get a little ridiculous to keep up. Arthur Baer isn’t just saying Grove threw hard. He’s saying Grove’s fastball made basic physics feel negotiable, the way a truly elite skill forces metaphors to sprint.

The image works because it’s built on instinct. A wolf doesn’t “decide” to chase meat; it can’t help itself. A lamb chop is pure trigger. So if Grove can throw that bait past a predator, he’s not merely overpowering batters, he’s beating nature’s most reliable reflex. That’s a sharper brag than “he was unhittable,” because it implies the hitter isn’t failing intellectually or mechanically; he’s losing a battle against something primal. By the time the batter recognizes “food,” it’s already gone.

There’s also a classically American, early-20th-century showman’s rhythm to it: rural, visceral, a little vaudeville. Grove, a working-class Maryland farm kid turned mound terror, gets framed in the vernacular of barnyards and hunts rather than in the sterile metrics we’d use now. Before radar guns and spin-rate charts, writers had to manufacture velocity in the reader’s body. Baer’s metaphor does that: you feel the snap, the blur, the humiliating late reaction.

Under the joke sits a serious point about legend-making. Sportswriting turns performance into folklore because folklore lasts longer than box scores, and Baer is doing the work of myth in one clean, absurd bite.