Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.

We play because we are wired for joy; it is imperative as human beings.

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.

But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

Sometimes everything breaks up so something new can break through.

A talent somewhat above mediocrity shrewd and not too sensitive is more likely to rise in the world than genius which is apt to be perturbable and to wear itself out before fruition.

If I had ever been set down in any one place and told I was to play there, and nowhere else, for the rest of my life, I should have chosen the Old Course at St. Andrews.

You will find it easiest to ride the avalanche in the direction it already travels.

My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he has been hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight back.

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.

I always acted like a star long before I was one.

Without publicity a terrible thing happens: nothing.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

I AM! YOU ARE! AND LOVE: IS ALL: THAT MATTERS!