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

I’m going to sit back, light up, and hope I don’t chew the cigarette to pieces.

Don’t let the winds blow your dreams away… or steal your faith in God.

You can almost taste the pressure now.

I try to call the play as quickly as I possibly can and then shut up and let the crowd roar because, to me, the crowd is the most wonderful thing in the whole world when it’s making noise.

A man really determines himself by what he does.

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.

In baseball, it’s tough to get up for every single game, every single moment. In football, you have 90,000 fans screaming and the band’s playing. I do miss that

At Texas, I was a football player playing baseball. And the way I play I think I still am.

I have fun. I always have fun. I don’t really get in a hurry about anything. I just try to go with the flow and have fun, and that’s how I try to play baseball.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

The people of America care about baseball, not about your squalid little squabbles. Reassume your dignity and remember that you (players during the 1981 strike) are the temporary custodians of an enduring public trust.

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America’s most privileged version of the level field.