Baseball is really two sports -- the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind.

An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

I think baseball is a great support to people who have emotional voids, gaps, emotional difficulties. That is to say: all of us. Those parts of us that don’t function well. Those parts of us that are sad or depressed—not every day. They can really use baseball. It isn't just the child in a wheelchair or the shut-in senior citizen listening to the radio that needs the game. There’s part of us, part of everybody who’s a baseball fan, who needs the game at that level.