Let me get this straight. The owners are about to shut down baseball when it's more prosperous than it's even been, and the players are the ones who have to get their urine tested?
I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson. He told me to get back behind the batter; that the only thing I knew about pitching was that it was hard to hit!
If we're going to win the pennant, we've got to start thinking we're not as good as we think we are.
I'd be willing to bet you, if I was a betting man, that I have never bet on baseball.
Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.
Baseball players quit playing and they take up golf. Basketball players quit, take up golf. Football players quit, take up golf. What are we supposed to take up when we quit?
Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.
I remember growing up, getting the Colorado Springs Sun in the morning and the Denver Post in the afternoon, and my dad just inhaling both of them, and me waiting to get the sports page from him. I fell in love with the craft. I remember being 9 years old and playing baseball in the backyard and coming in and writing little newspaper articles for my dad.
Montreal leads Atlanta by three, 5-1.
The more we lose, the more he'll fly in. And the more he flies in, the better the chance there'll be a plane crash.
You can't be afraid to make errors! You can't be afraid to be naked before the crowd, because no one can ever master the game of baseball, or conquer it. You can only challenge it.
Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width.
Even though you make twelve hundred bucks a month, if I was making twelve hundred bucks a month to play baseball, I would have done it. I would have stayed.
These days baseball is different. You come to Spring Training, you get your legs ready, you arms loose, your agents ready your lawyer lined up.
You can have the best team in baseball, and if nobody goes through the turnstiles, you've got to shut the doors down.
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.
I was being thrown to the wolves. Even though I did something great, nobody wanted to be a part of it. I was so isolated. I couldn't share it. For many years, even after Jackie Robinson, baseball was so segregated, really. You just didn't expect us to have a chance to do anything. Baseball was meant for the lily-white.
Going back down to the minors is the toughest thing to handle in baseball.
Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.
that crack of the bat against a ball has been my mantra, a sound I hear in desperate moments, at times when I crave total satisfaction, a sound I hear over and over when I want something very badly but can't express what it is.