#Baseball

"When her boyfriend broke his leg, I knew it was my chance to ask her to dance. So I put down my baseball bat and approached her like Babe Ruth."

"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."

"The thing I write will be the thing I write."

"Yeah, I miss it. You don't just break off a friendship you've had with a sport, and with all those you've met all over the country. We've got some friends, some very close friends, and you just sit back and think how fortunate you were having a career like that. And, actually, there's nothing in the game of baseball that hasn't happened to me."

"I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate - and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life - is the loneliness on the road."

"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."

"I’ll convert a school desk into a tricycle, because how else am I supposed to learn to love? It’s not like baseball gloves are very effective oven mitts."

"The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto."

"Kids are our future, and we hope baseball has given them some idea of what it is to live together and how we can get along, whether you be black or white."

"A pitcher throws baseballs, but a pitcher also holds liquid. My emotions are so fluid I wonder how large the pitcher would have to be to hold my heart. Probably 6’3”."

"[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)"

"Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear -- and doubt."

"Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game!"