You've got to have one of those guys on your ball club that, when you have runners on scoring position, you know that guy is going to drive the ball and put the ball in play and pick them up.
Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.
There's only one way to become a hitter. Go up to the plate and get mad. Get mad at yourself and mad at the pitcher.
I probably hit 35 balls into the right-field bleachers.
Everybody in the league knew I had trouble with the inside pitch. I got away with it only because the great majority of pitchers were afraid of making a mistake in that spot. The threat of power is one of the best weapons you have in the batter's box.
Baseball is a movable conversation across nine innings. It is eye contact with the person seated next to you in a park where the pitcher is separated from the batter by 60 feet, six inches or in a family room where a 60-inch TV screen hangs on the wall.
I couldn't hit a home run to save my life, and I was a sucker for the curveball.
If you want to walk me, walk me. But if I see something close to home plate, I want to swing.
Let the pitcher move first, then, as he draws his arm back, you draw the bat back and you are ready.
Baseball is a game of tradition. It lives, in large measure, on its past.
When you go up there in the batter's box, you're engaged to hit. It's the same thing with baserunning.
You don't always make an out. Sometimes the pitcher gets you out.
Baseball is a game of inches.
The only real game - I think - in the world is baseball.
I love baseball so much, ever since I was a child playing during the summers.
There's something magical about a home run. It almost violates the space of the stadium. It's a game of the imagination in some ways. Baseball.
