The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

No one man is superior to the game.

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

I think that the young people today feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to their brothers and sisters because of the sacrifices that most families make to send their children to college.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.