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.
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.
I didnt really grow up a comic book fanatic. I was a big baseball player, and my passion in life, in third grade, was collecting baseball cards. That was my childhood thing.
I wanted to be a baseball player, naturally, but I wasn't good enough. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I just had a kind of energy, I was a fairly happy kid.
If somebody is really trying to take your head off with a baseball bat - I don't know how long you're supposed to stand there and turn the other cheek, so he or she can get a better angle at taking your head off.
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.
In baseball, it's tough to get up for every single game, every single moment. In football, you have 90,000 fans screaming and the band's playing. I do miss that adrenaline rush.
I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.
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.