Quotes from Jane Leavy

He really loved baseball and loved being on the field. But Mantle was lonely in a lot of ways. He had many great friends, and by all accounts was a good, generous and loyal friend. But there were a lot of people who wanted only a piece of him.

In the glory days of Orioles, when I was a newbie baseball writer for the Post, the roster of talkers was as good as the everyday lineup. Singy - Ken Singleton - Flanny, and Cakes - the underwear spokesman Jim Palmer - were my go-to guys, occupying stalls along one wall of the shabby chic clubhouse.

In the immortal words of Willie Stargell, trying to hit Koufax was like "trying to drink coffee with a fork.

It's like being in the ballpark with Jesus.

When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, 'Don't be like me.' The transformation of The Mick parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours.

He was a meteor streaking across the heavens

He remembers when you didn't need FBI clearance to talk to a ballplayer and baseball was what you did until you grew up.

Asked once what he was doing to keep busy in retirement, Hank Aaron replied, "I'm being Hank Aaron.

You pitch outside, you throw inside," he liked to say.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

Naming is a privilege of reason and the province of bullies. We name to tame and to maim; to honor the great, the dead, and ourselves.

Wherever Mantle went in the great metropolis - Danny's Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the '21' Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor's - his preferred drink was waiting when he walked through the door. Reporters waited at his locker for monosyllabic bons mots. Boys clustered by the players' gate, hoping to touch him.

Sports journalism is in the midst of an identity crisis so profound that we no longer know whether we're made up of one word or two.

There is no free speech in football. Information is parsed by monosyllabic head coaches, who dictate who gets to speak to whom and when.

The world is not kind to whistleblowers - a term of art with particular resonance in football, the most hierarchical and repressive of organized sports, a world of 'systems' and 'programs' and scripted plays, where reading a medical report requires a security clearance, and practice fields are patrolled like Guantanamo Bay.

When my father realized he was going blind, he took up golf.

On winter Sundays when I was a child, we waited for my father to return from his tennis game with bagels and sturgeon and for my mother to object when the 1 P.M. Giants game began.

For most of my adult life, I dreaded the day I woke up and saw my mother in the mirror. It never happened. But, I had grown into my father. I shouldn't have been surprised. Everyone always said I was the son he never had.

In 1927, my father descended the heights and took his place as the newly appointed water boy for his beloved New York football Giants.

By the 1880s, baseball was entrenched in the Cape's sandy soil. Semipro teams, commonplace before World War I, were organized into the first Cape Cod League in 1923 - Orleans joined the four original teams five years later. By 1940, the league had foundered on financial shoals and disbanded.

Trauma fractures comprehension as a pebble shatters a windshield. The wound at the site of impact spreads across the field of vision, obscuring reality and challenging belief.

Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.

By the time I joined the 'Washington Post' sports staff in 1979, Red's Runyonesque notion of sports writing was obsolete.

At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole family had been following Mantle and Maris chase Babe Ruth's home run record across the country.