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

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

As every golfer knows, no one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of shot after shot watching your score go to tatters - knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each hole.

Cheating is baseball's oldest profession. No other game is so rich in skullduggery, so suited to it or so proud of it.

The best place to catch a baseball hit by (Mark) McGwire is definitely not within the confines of the playing field, or sometimes even the ballpark. Other players dial '1' for long distance. McGwire has to ask for an international operator.

I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

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.