Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

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

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.