Believe it or not, I worked four summers in college as a sports writer covering baseball for a parks and rec department in Bayonne, N.J.
I only had one player in my 33 years of sports that couldn't be traded. He wore No. 23 - and 45 when he played baseball.
There's nothing to it. Baseball isn't that tough to play.
If you don't like the way the Atlanta Braves are playing then you don't like baseball.
I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
I've done literally everything there is to do on a baseball field as a pitcher.
I wanted to play baseball!
Baseball is a little bigger gamble than most, and the stakes are pretty high.
It was a terrible day for baseball, it was a worse day for Congress.
Humanity is the keystone that holds nations and men together. When that collapses, the whole structure crumbles. This is as true of baseball teams as any other pursuit in life.
Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.
Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.
I went through baseball as 'a player to be named later.'
Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.
Really, it's not harder to train for them because once baseball starts you play everyday almost.
For my children, they spent 15 to 20 years of their life in baseball. And Ruth and I spent so many years of our married life that that was our life. We knew nothing else.
No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton's laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently.
Baseball and its teams are proud of the sport's long-standing role as a change agent in American culture and society.
When I grew up, baseball was the No. 1 sport.
Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.
The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have.
I've got a wife, four kids, a business, and a baseball career.
If you seriously aspire to be a manager in the big leagues, there is a baseball 'book' that one must learn. Alongside that book, you must practice Spanish. Of 25 players on each roster, sometimes there are between eight and 15 players who speak Spanish.
Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.
I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.
You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.
I played baseball up until my freshman year of high school. That was my main sport. I played third base.
It's very warm there, so we were outdoors all the time. The local people had programs for us year-round, where as kids we had the opportunity to play football, basketball, baseball, track and field - we just went from one sport to the next, year-round.
Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.
That was real baseball. We weren't playing for money. They gave us Mickey Mouse watches that ran backwards.
Baseball is a game of race, creed, and color. The race is to first base. The creed is the rules of the game. The color? Well, the home team wears white uniforms, and the visiting team wears gray.
The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
As a youngster, I played in Little League, Pony League, and all sorts of amateur baseball programs growing up.
I have a 48-hour rule. No drinking two days before a start. But those other days? Yes, I'm gonna go out. If I was locked up in my house all week, I don't know what I'd be like on the baseball field.
The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.
When I started to sing, my mother would have me engaged to perform at the Women's Christian Temperance Union national or annual meetings. I would hate doing this because I wanted to play baseball or go off skiing.
