“It’s easier to pick off a fast runner than to pick off a lazy runner.”

I guess my thermometer for my baseball fever is still a goose bump.

It’s a great time of the year. If you can stand it.

If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That’s the kind of thing that I love to do.

I’ve told several writers this, and, again, I get back to it, but if you want to make God smile, tell him your plans.

I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author. It’s only me.

As long as you live keep smiling because it brightens everybody’s day.

Good is not good when better is expected.

I don’t like to be alone, but I do cherish the moments that I’m alone with a good book.

Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.

Thank you for sneaking your transistor under the pillow as you grew up loving the Tigers. God has a new adventure for me.

I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate – and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life – is the loneliness on the road.

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

One of my favorite expressions ever uttered by a player is Roy Campanella’s line about how, in order to be a major-league player, you have to have a lot of little boy in you.

If I categorized home runs that I’ve seen, without a doubt the monumental one is Henry’s. But I’ve seen a lot of classic, great home runs. Gibson’s was probably the most theatrical home run I’ve ever seen.

When I was very small, maybe 8 years old, we had a big radio that stood on four legs, and it had a cross piece underneath it, and I used to take a pillow and crawl under the radio.

Be a bobbed cork: When you are pushed down, bob up.

It is not easy to stop thinking ill of others.Usually one must enter into a friendship with a person who has accomplished that great feat himself.Then something might start to rub off on you of that true elegance.

I’ve never had a sense of entitlement. I saw how hard my father worked for his money, and it was always made very clear to me that things wouldn’t just be given to me.

Those ills are easiest to bear with which we are most familiar.

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

I feel like every time I write a song, it feels like the first time I wrote a song. It’s just as hard. It doesn’t get easier, but that’s why I love it: because it’s a challenge every time.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

The hardest part of leaving is to make it look so easy… isn’t that the unfortunate fuckin truth.

You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it’s easy. I work long hours.