It is the best of all games for me. It frequently escapes from the pattern of sport and assumes the form of a virile ballet. It is purer than any dance because the actions of the players are not governed by music or crowded into a formula by a director. The movement is natural and unrehearsed and controlled only by the unexpected flight of the ball.
A baseball field must be the most beautiful thing in the world. It's so honest and precise. And we play on it. Every star gets humbled. Every mediocre player has a great moment.
The tradition of professional baseball always has been agreeably free of chivalry. The rule is, "Do anything you can get away with."
If you are worshipping false gods-such as football, baseball, gold, tennis, or money or technology or automobiles or houses or gold or silver-and you can tell what a man worships by what he does on Sunday-repent and start worshipping the true and living God, the maker of heaven and earth and all things that in them are.
Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom's apple pie.
I don't understand. All of a sudden, it's not just BA and Runs Scored, it's OBA. And what is with O-P-S?
I had just turned 20, and Jackie told me the only way to be successful at anything was to go out and do it. He said baseball was a game you played every day, not once a week.
Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
Baseball as I have said before to many... many parents it's not about wins and losses. It's about the life lessons that are learned on that baseball field. The perseverance, the hard work that it takes, dealing with failure.
I can't very well tell my batters don't hit it to him. Wherever they hit it, he's there anyway (Mays).
Do you know the nicest thing about looking at pictures of a 1950's baseball park? The only people wearing baseball caps are the players.
Every time I sit with our general manager at a baseball game, and there's number-cruncher and statistician guy - I'm sitting around - they start talking about stuff, and I say, 'What's that? I've never heard of that one before.
To have some idea what it's like, stand in the outside lane of a motorway, get your mate to drive his car at you at 95 mph and wait until he's 12 yards away, before you decide which way to jump.
It's a beautiful day for a night game.
I always took my workouts serious because I have a football background. I came from football, so when I got to baseball, I continued my football workouts in the offseason.
Probably the most dramatic change in pitching I've observed in my years in baseball has been the disappearance of the knockdown or brushback pitch. This is why record numbers of home runs are flying out of ballparks, why earned run averages are soaring, and why there are so few twenty game winners in the majors.
I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.
I was thinking (when he hit his 500th home run) about my mother and dad, about all the people in the Chicago Cubs organization that helped me and about the wonderful Chicago fans who have come out all these years to cheer me on. They've been a great inspiration to me.
Baseball teaches that errors are part of the game.
My dad and I, we used to play baseball. I was the catcher. Which I liked. Until one day, I saw this game on TV, and I said, Hang on, how come their catcher doesn't have his hands tied to his ankles?
If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
Baseball's still a game. I don't want it to be work. I want it to be a game.
One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures.
President Bush left for Canada today to attend a trade summit. Reportedly, the trade summit got off to an awkward start when the president pulled out his baseball cards.
There is no room in baseball for a clown.
