Most people have favorite players. I have favorite quotes and favorite misconceptions. I have written about the quotes: “The two of them deserve each other; one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted;” “There’s nothing so limited as a limited partner in the Yankees;” “The Yankees are the evil empire.”

Those comments, made in order by Billy Martin, John McMullen and Larry Lucchino, were all made to me so I can attest to their accuracy. I can vouch, too, for the correct versions of my three favorite misconceptions:

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I have been to World Series games and witnessed walk-offs. I have attended sunny day games and survived battles of attrition on cold, rainy nights. In the entirety of my baseball experience, the most electric crowd of which I have ever been a part was at Nationals Park on June 8, 2010. Just days earlier, the ballpark had been sparsely populated for a game against Cincinnati, with the lower-level seats all but unused.

When I arrived on June 8, though, a constant stream of fans was already shuffling into the stadium two hours before gametime; my seat actually had a cobweb for decoration, a sad reminder of the last time Nationals fans had gone in droves to the ballpark and actually sat in the nosebleed section. That night was different. It was the debut of the highly touted phenom, Stephen Strasburg.

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The Chicago Cubs had to do something. Carlos Zambrano was acting up again so general manager Jim Hendry banished him without pay for 30 days, and the team was playing so poorly the Cubs fired Hendry. The interesting twist is Hendry deserved it more than Zambrano.

I don’t like to see people get fired, but sports history is filled with the dismissal of general managers, managers and coaches who have been fired for failing to get the job done. I like Hendry, but how long could the Cubs’ new owner, Tom Ricketts, spend more than $125 million on the Cubs’ payroll, which he has done each of his first two years, and not get at least a contender out of it?

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