Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Lewis

In two clipped sentences, Michael Lewis captures the peculiar civic ecosystem that turns a baseball team into a moral weather vane. Calling the Red Sox "local scapegoats" isn’t just sports griping; it’s a diagnosis of how cities outsource their frustration. The word "local" does heavy lifting: this isn’t abstract fandom, it’s neighborhood-scale identity politics, where a team becomes the most visible, most discussable proxy for everything residents can’t control - the economy, class anxiety, a sense of being overlooked by national power centers.

Lewis’s intent is characteristically anthropological. He’s less interested in batting averages than in the transaction between public emotion and public performance. Scapegoating implies ritual: the community needs a vessel to carry failure so the rest of civic life can feel cleaner. That’s why the line works; it reframes sports pressure as social labor. The players aren’t only expected to win. They’re expected to absorb the town’s self-loathing and still hit a fastball.

The second sentence tightens into dry compassion: "hard enough to play baseball" acknowledges the inherent difficulty of elite competition, then adds the extra, irrational burden of being blamed for more than the score. Underneath is a critique of fan entitlement and media narration - the constant manufacturing of villains to keep the story machine running. In the Red Sox context, it nods to Boston’s long history of dramatizing near-misses as character flaws, turning losing into a civic personality trait and then demanding the team redeem it on schedule.