Those who live by the wall must die by the wall.

The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they're basically overlooked.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.

We are all writers and readers as well as communicators with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves with the clear and almost perfect thought.

The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park's second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate.