The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.

Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

I try not to kid myself. You know, I don’t mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.

The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.

I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing.

There are only two seasons – winter and Baseball.

I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

I was in the game for love. After all, where else can an old-timer with one leg, who can’t hear or see, live like a king while doing the only thing I wanted to do?

After a month or so in St. Louis, we were looking around desperately for a way to draw a few people into the ball park, it being perfectly clear by that time that the ball club wasn’t going to do it unaided.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.

I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.