There is a special sensation in getting good wood on the ball and driving a double down the left-field line as the crowd in the ballpark rises to its feet and cheers. But, I also remember how much fun I had as a skinny barefoot kid hitting a tennis b...
If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never se...
The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. T...
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked...
What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't p...
I'm not going out and hitting a 95-mph fastball where I can't see the stitches. I'm not on a professional football team looking to tackle a fullback who is built like solid wood. I'm a thinking person, and I've been blessed with the ability to see so...
It's funny, because I don't have a very addictive personality in any way except for things like stories or books or movies or TV. I just get, like, completely enamored and lost in that world, especially when one really hits the right way. Like, I jus...
I realized I was gay in the shower one day with Barbra Streisand. It happened while I was lathering, rinsing, and repeating with Pert Plus. As I was belting out the chorus to my favorite song from 'Funny Girl,' 'Oh my man, I love him so, he'll never ...
As a kid I'd lie awake at night and convince myself that a meteor was about to hit the Earth. It's my fatalistic streak, which I've inherited from my mum. I firmly believe something cataclysmic is going to happen in my lifetime and I have to be prepa...
I've been around golf my whole life. My father did it all the time, and I resented him for it. But a couple years ago I picked up a golf club and I understood the physics of it. If anyone knows anything about golf, it's that once you hit a few shots,...
I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit yo...
I look at the Samurai because they were the artists of their time. What I think struck me when I read Bushido is compassion. 'If there's no one there to help, go out and find someone to help.' That hit me, because I try to lead my life like that.
My favorite thing about guitar, and the thing that always drew me to it when I was first learning to play it, was those moments when you think you know what it might sound like, but you don't, and then you hit it, and it's a total surprise. You hear ...
You know, I still love the innocent parts of the game. I love hitting tennis balls. I love seeing the young guys do well. I'll still have a lot of friends to watch. I'll miss the relationships probably the most. As time passes, I'll probably miss the...
When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
I was mugged when I was 12. I had a portable radio, and I ran into this building and these two guys came in and hit me, busted me up and took the radio. After that I was very paranoid and I started taking kung fu and karate. But I didn't want to figh...
I played Little League. I was a 'pitcher.' But we had a pitching machine, so I was just basically an 'in-infield' shortstop because all I got to do was field bloopers six feet from the plate. I couldn't hit, so that was pretty much my entire job.
You reduce illegal immigration by making it harder to get jobs here, or easier to get jobs south of the border. This idea that we can't pass an immigration law until we hit some imaginary security target is just a way to derail reform.
For years I've been hearing 20-somethings say they don't expect Social Security to be around when they hit 65. Eventually, I came to realize that they really mean that they just don't expect to be 65. Or 40. Neither did I, when I was 22.
I got that nickname my first spring training camp with the Expos in 1974. Tim Foli, Ken Singleton and Mike Jorgensen started calling me 'Kid' because I was trying to win every sprint. I was trying to hit every pitch out of the park.
