Baseball in the Navy always was much more fun than it had been in the major leagues.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn't pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn... If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year's time.

Baseball is only a game, a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war, sports are very insignificant.

Where the ball went was up to heaven. Sometimes I threw the ball clean up into the stands.

You can talk about teamwork on a baseball team, but I'll tell you, it takes teamwork when you have 2,900 men stationed on the U.S.S. Alabama in the South Pacific.

Yankee Stadium, it's like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.