Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.
James Patrick Murray

People like us are afraid to leave ball. What else is there to do? When baseball has been your whole life, you can't think about a future without it, so you hang on as long as you can.
Willie Stargell

I have been a fan all my life, but now I have been out of football for over 10 years, and out of baseball for a little over six years and I don't go to games.
Bo Jackson

Well, my favorite sport as a kid was clearly baseball.
Leigh Steinberg

The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have.
Willie Mays

I was a baseball player, I taught baseball, and all of a sudden I was in the business world. Now I used the baseball world to talk about their product. Not too much, just enough to keep going. Just be yourself and you'll never have a problem. That's what I did.
Willie Mays

And my father didn't have money for me to go to college. And at that particular time they didn't have black quarterbacks, and I don't think I could have made it in basketball, because I was only 5' 11". So I just picked baseball.
Willie Mays

Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game.
Ted Williams

I want to play music when I want, write a song if I want or watch a baseball game if I want.
John Lee Hooker

I never ride just to ride. I ride to catch a fox. I play baseball to make the team.
Sargent Shriver

There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder. More mistakes are made hitting than in any other part of the game.
Ted Williams

To me, baseball has always been a reflection of life. Like life, it adjusts. It survives everything.
Willie Stargell

Baseball for me was instinctive, born within me, given to me as a gift from God.
Willie Stargell

I found myself in a race with Mother Nature to play as much baseball as I could before she forced me to stop.
Willie Stargell

I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.
Rafael Palmeiro

My first job after my retirement from baseball was as a narrator for the Eastman Philharmonica.
Willie Stargell

So you have to be more mentally focused in baseball.
Bo Jackson

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.
Jim Bouton

Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail.
John Thorn

Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what is most truly is is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.
Willie Mays