Quotes About Baseball

I developed an interest in the history of the Negro leagues to the point where I visited the museum in Kansas City, Mo., twice and made the museum an integral part of my unheralded 2005 coming-of-age baseball novel, 'Scooter.'

There's not a ballpark I've ever played in as a visitor or home that has the historic feel and energy that Fenway Park has.

When I was covering games, and this is back in the '60s, you'd go into the manager's office. I can still visualize Earl Weaver from the Baltimore Orioles. I can just see Earl now in his underwear... with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, holding court. And that was the way it was done then.

I study pitchers. I visualize pitches. That gives me a better chance every time I step into the box. That doesn't mean I'm going to get a hit every game, but that's one of the reasons I've come a long way as a hitter.

If he wasn't so vital in my younger days, I would have never kept up with baseball. At some point, your dad has to motivate you until you actually realize what you're doing.

I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.

It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.

I don't want to be one of those great players who never made it to the Series.

I have sets, literally, of almost every single year of Strat-O-Matic baseball. That's how huge I was into it.

I don't think I'm going to dwell on one pitch. You've got to be able to shake that off in the middle of the game.

I don't worry about infield shifts at all - you play where you're gonna play. I'm just gonna pitch my game.

I was a center fielder, and I played shortstop.

I just like showing people - and this might be at the root of everything that I've done - that I don't want to be looked at as a baseball robot.

Babe Ruth was great. I'm just lucky.

Other boys went to see Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth came to see me.

I know I never saw Casey Stengel when I was being scouted. And how could you be in a ballpark and not know if Casey Stengel was there?

But I want you to know that what I'm doing here I'm doing as a ballplayer, a major league ballplayer.

I probably hit 35 balls into the right-field bleachers.

I wanted to show Baltimore that they were getting a good ballplayer.

Out of respect for the Baltimore Orioles, it would have to be a crazy scenario for them to look differently on me and for me not to come back.

Lou Brock was a great base stealer but today I am the greatest.

In the postseason, as many ways as you can get on base as possible is big.

I played baseball growing up, second base, and then when I got to high school,it just didn't exist there.

I loved to hit with men on base and with the game on the line.