BILL VEECK

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.

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

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.

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

There are only two seasons - winter and Baseball.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

An island of surety in a changing world.

Three strikes, you're out. I don't care if you hire Edward Bennett Williams to defend you; three strikes, you're still out. Baseball is an island of stability in an unstable world.

I don't mind the high price of stardom. I just don't like the high price of mediocrity.

I believe in God, but I'm not too clear on the other details.

I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.

The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.

Suffering is overated.

Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.