There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit.
Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.
When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.
Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.
Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. - From The Brooklyn Nine
I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to - the beauty of playing baseball.
That's why I've gotten so much experience at my age. You have three teachers next to you every game, and if I'm not playing, I'm watching baseball. You pick up little things here and there.
There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.
What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game...There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.
You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
I don't know what drives me to succeed. I know I want to always do the best I can.I guess I was maybe in little league baseball as far as I wanted to be good at that. But school, I certainly wasn't the best at that.