Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.

Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.

Sports just happen to be excellent for avoiding foreign-language stage fright and developing lasting friendships while still sounding like Tarzan.

Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

To be successful in sports, you need to learn techniques and skills and practice them regularly.

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

I see great things in baseball.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Shooting well with the rifle is the highest kind of skill, for the rifle is the queen of weapons; and it is a difficult art to learn.

Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.

[A]ll of life, as we know it, moves in little, unavailing circles. More justly than to anything else, it can be likened to the game of baseball. Crack! we hit the ball, and away we go. If we earn a run (in life we call it success) we get back to the home plate and sit upon a bench. If we are thrown out, we walk back to the home plate — and sit upon a bench.

Running taught me valuable lessons. In cross-country competition, training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did. Even as a student, I saw many young men who had great natural ability, but who did not have the self-discipline and patience to build on their endowment.