No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball.
These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.
If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.
Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.
Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine. And that's really living.
I love the fans, I love the game of baseball, and I love Cincinnati baseball.
I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn't pick me to play baseball.
Baseball is the greatest sport in the world. It is the cleanest, besides affording more people the right kind of amusement than any other. I do not say that because I have made my living at it. I say it from the heart.
With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.
The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes - the boys of summer - is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.
I'm a sports-watcher. I played football and baseball, coached baseball. So I watch those things.
In baseball I was pretty cocky.
I'm always flattered when someone thinks of me as a potential commissioner of baseball.
For me, baseball is more comparable to chess than it is to hockey.
There's absolutely no comparisons to me or anyone else to Willie Mays. Willie Mays, he's the greatest baseball player of all time.
Three of the brightest baseball pitchers of their times staged comebacks without much success - David Cone, Jim Bouton and Jim Palmer - but there was room to admire their quixotic gesture.
For generations, minor-league baseball has been seen as the scrappier, sometimes seedier, counterpart to its big-league sibling. Games are often cloaked in strange and sometimes awkward theme nights. Some of the mascots are ragged or downright bizarre. The ballparks are smaller and filled with fewer fans.
I don't like baseball movies. I like movies about moral courage and people who are indomitable and courageous and right.
Nicknames are baseball, names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy.
My dad had me in little baseball outfits and bats in the crib.