"In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer."

“I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.”

“No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.”

“At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.”

“Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.”

“The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.”

“In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.”