Pop Fisher: “You’re thirty-five if you’re a day.”
Roy Hobbs: “Thirty-four, but I’m good for ten years.”
Pop Fisher: “Thirty-four — Holy Jupiter, mister, you belong in an old man’s home, not baseball.”
— The Natural, Bernard Malamud, 1952
At age 34, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, Amelia Earhart flew solo across the Atlantic, and Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. On Opening Day, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter, Dexter Fowler, and Andrew Miller will also be 34, but that often-flowering age can be cruel to athletes.