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I loved baseball. I was a pitcher. I loved being on the mound because I also loved being at the center of the action, the cat and mouse battle with the batter on every pitch. You had to develop grit.
I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field, nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.
My favorite team growing up was the Cincinnati Reds. Living within 10 minutes of the ball park I went to as many games as possible growing up as long as they didn't conflict with my baseball schedule.
At 17, I went to Stanford University to study engineering. My time was occupied with the required reading and the extracurricular duties of managing the baseball and football teams and earning my way.
When I went blind at 13, I realized that I wasn't going to be a good baseball or basketball player like I enjoyed before. It forced me to look beyond the obvious, to things that I could still do well.
That's how easy baseball was for me. I'm not trying to brag or anything, but I had the knowledge before I became a professional baseball player to do all these things and know what each guy would hit.
I had the pleasure, as Robin said, to live a childhood dream as many young Americans and Puerto Rican children live that play youth baseball. And I feel honored and very thankful for that opportunity.
Sports like baseball or baseball are easy to dramatise, because all of them have a pause and that helps with the tension. Football never stops. I'm a football fan. I believe in the beauty of the game.
When I first signed with the Yankees, the regulars wouldn't talk to you until you were with the team three or four years. Nowadays the rookies get $100,000 to sign and they don't talk to the regulars.
In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color, merely something to distinguish one team's uniform from another's.
I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn't really there yet.
Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is.
A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
Thomas is racing for it, but McCovey is there and can't get his glove to it. That play shows the inexperience, not on Thomas' part, but on the part of Willie McC ... well, not on McCovey's part either.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it, it still very probably makes a sound. A baseball game that's played with no one around to watch it, though - that's a different proposition.
I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I'd never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.
I had an extremely boring time doing 20 to 30 trades a day while everyone was talking about baseball or basketball. So I stood there fantasizing about a device that could do the same thing I was doing.
When I played ball, I didn't play for fun. . . . It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.
Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years.
I probably follow all sports a little bit. I like hockey quite a bit. I like football. I like college basketball when it gets down to March Madness. I like baseball. I enjoy them all. I watch them all.
Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps.
If you can't enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.
What's odd is that nobody in my family is an artist. My cousins are like secretaries at law firms or nurses or just more blue collar. And I was in a baseball team. I used to be like a really big tomboy.
We're proud of Venezuela and Venezuelan baseball. People in America don't realize it, but we've got 25, 30 million people here, and so many of us love baseball. This is a great place to look for talent.
Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.
Fix your eye on the ball from the moment the pitcher holds it in his glove. Follow it as he throws to the plate and stay with it until the play is completed. Action takes place only where the ball goes.
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.
My message to a lot of guys is, if you like school and you like education, baseball is gonna be there, and you can get some of the same great competition in college that you do in the low minor leagues.
I don't know where the loyalty lies in baseball. You really don't have to protect each other much, unless there's like a bench-clearing brawl. In hockey, it's important that they look out for each other.
His doctors said he was, in many ways, the most remarkable patient they'd ever seen. His bravery, so stark and real, that even those used to seeing people in dire circumstances were moved by his example.
There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.
Baseball is a tongue-tied kid from Georgia growing up to be an announcer and praising the Lord for showing him the way to Cooperstown. This is a game for America. Still a game for America, this baseball!
I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.
A lot of older parents worry about being older parents. I hear people say, 'I don't want to be too old to play baseball with my son.' They worry that their kids will be embarrassed by their parents' age.
We are fortunate and blessed to have a partner of Harvey Schiller's stature, who shares our vision for the future of the Dodgers, the city of Los Angeles and our great baseball fans throughout the world.
I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There's great truth in that.
My dad's a bodybuilder. My whole life I've been taught to train the hard way. I believe in earning strength, not buying it. My grandfather raised me old school: In baseball, you work for whatever you get.
I really enjoyed high-school football, but I didn't really enjoy college football. I liked to play the games, but I didn't like the practice. In baseball, I enjoy the practice almost as much as the games.
I played baseball too, and flag football, but basketball was the easiest for me. Then when I was 12, my dad asked me what I wanted to do, and I said 'Be an NBA player.' Since then, he started training me.
You have to know what you're doing and where you're going. For some guys, the answer is just keep doing what you're doing. For other guys, that might not be the case. It just depends on what kind you are.
Every hitter likes fastballs, just like everybody likes ice cream. But you don't like it when someone's stuffing it into you by the gallon. That's what it feels like when Nolan Ryan's thrown balls by you.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
Wives of ballplayers, when they teach their children their prayers, should instruct them to say: God bless mommy, God bless daddy, and God bless Babe Ruth! He's upped daddy's paycheck by 15 to 40 percent!
[ Chadwick Boseman] was not a baseball player. He spent, I don't know, countless hours, many months, working two sessions a day with professional pro coaches to develop the baseball skills that he needed.
Casey didn't easily forgive a guy who got doubled up on a hit-and-run play. He didn't see any reason why the runner couldn't take a quick glance back toward the plate to make sure the ball was hit safely.
I know that baseball players have certain rituals or habits that they develop, because sometimes it becomes somewhat superstitious if they get on a streak and want to do the same thing over and over again.
If you want to get to know me, you have to get off the baseball field. Because when I'm on the field, and in the clubhouse, I'm doing what I'm paid to do, what I love to do, and man, I hate it when I fail.
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
Baseball I played literally from the time I can remember. My dad had played, my older brother played, so I always wanted to be like my older brother. That just kind of was a natural thing that I fell into.