“There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.”

On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch — engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

Major sports are major parts of society. It’s not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

Some of my academic friends think Ive fallen from a very special grace.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

I’m the world’s expert on sterotypes held by academics about athletes and held by athletes about academics. To me, both of them are caricatures.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination? through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.

People will say I’m an idealist. I hope so.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.

[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.

You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else.

Baseball has undergone and absorbed a whole set of dislocations.

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

80 percent of the balls that don’t reach the hole, don’t go in.

The other teams could make trouble for us if they win.

Pitching always beats batting – and vice-versa.

If you get a guy that can play a couple positions, it helps you out a real lot.

How can you think and hit at the same time?

The hardest thing is to get started, but the really hardest thing is to finish.

You stand up for your teammates. Your loyalty is to them. You protect them through good and bad, because they’d do the same for you.