This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance - thrown hard and with precision.

I felt what I almost always feel when I am watching a ballgame: Just for those two or three hours, there is really no place I would rather be.

I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can't remember.

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.

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

Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.