Quotes About Baseball

If it happens, I'll be proud, and it would be a dream come true, though I doubt I ever thought I'd be a Hall of Famer when I started. It wasn't until late in my career that people started to mention it, and you start thinking about it a little bit.

Just as the common law derives from ancient precedents - judges' decisions - rather than statutes, baseball's codes are the game's distilled mores. Their unchanged purpose is to show respect for opponents and the game. In baseball, as in the remainder of life, the most important rules are unwritten. But not unenforced.

It's always special when you receive an award. Up here in the big leagues is special.

I played football in the fall when I was in high school. Then basketball, a different conditioning - you're running up and down the courts. Then you come into baseball, you're doing a sprint to hit a triple.

Umpires are supposed to be non-confrontational - they're supposed to uphold the peace on the baseball field.

My dad was a designer for Upper Deck, and I had hundreds of Ken Griffey Jr. cards. Hundreds. I could have paid for college with them.

In baseball, I had this lower body but nothing in the upper body. I had to counteract years of training and work the upper body.

When I was 12, I was taking batting practice with an aluminum bat at Tiger Stadium. I don't know where it landed exactly, but upper deck somewhere. Yeah, people were surprised.

Baseball is a hard game. There's going to be ups and downs.

The ups and downs, that's baseball life. That's what I live for, play for.

Although baseball actually began as a game played largely by urban toughs, its image was soon reconstructed to mirror the country's pastoral myth.

Different styles work for different guys... If you can handle shortstop and hit, teams will find a way to pencil you into the lineup.

There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them work.

This is my best time of the year (spring training). Heck, once the season starts, I go to work.

I could always throw the ball pretty well and I worked pretty hard at learning how to play the game. But I didn't consider it work as a kid, since I just loved playing baseball.

The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as 'steroids.'

I sort of ride the fence on that whole steroid era issue. I don't have a definite opinion like some of my fellow Hall of Famers. Some of the guys were very, very adamant about a person being associated with steroids: 'They'll never be in the Hall of Fame. If they are, I'll never come back.'

I'm sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids.

I played with 11 Hall of Famers and played against 52 Hall of Famers, and I don't know any of them linked to steroids.

Baseball needs to put the steroids era behind it by having and enforcing tough rules against all kinds of artificial advantages, so that spring can return.

In regards to steroids, I think we're all to blame, all of baseball. I never realized how far-reaching this problem has been.

I remember trying steroids very briefly in the 1989 -1990 off season, and then after I was injured in 1993, I used steroids again.

I've been a baseball fan in the early part of my life, so through the '70s and the '80s, I was a huge fan. I actually followed the Dodgers back then, back in the Kirk Gibson years, Steve Garvey.

In 83 I thought we were going to go all the way. We had Roy Smalley, and Steve King, and good players.