Ball parks are smaller and baseballs are livelier. They've practically got pitchers wearing straitjackets. Bah! They still allow the knuckleball, and that is three times as hard to control.
The fan is the one who suffers. He cheers a guy to a .350 season then watches that player sign with another team. When you destroy fan loyalties, you destroy everything.
That's what every young kid thinks about when they first put on a uniform - is to play in the Major League and then, ultimately, play in a World Series. To me, that was the ultimate, winning in '86.
You fool around with different pitches playing catch, but it's not the same when you've got to face some guy with a bat in his hand.
I've been on teams that lost a hundred games in a season. I've been on teams that had a shot to make the playoffs and fizzled out at the end.
It all comes down to when spring training comes. Do you want to go or don't you? If you want to go, you go.
Every Autumn now my thoughts return to snow. Snow is something I identify myself with. Like my father, I am a snow person.
But I want you to know that what I'm doing here I'm doing as a ballplayer, a major league ballplayer.
Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.
Whatever I contributed to the unique morale of the Cardinals was part of this growth, and so, of course, was my decision to have it out in public with the owners of organized baseball.
I am pleased God made my skin black. I only wish He had to made it thicker.
I worked on a farm. Played ball and loafed along the fishing and swimming holes of the White River, and my boyhood was not a lot different from that of other youngsters.
I guess what really made me a Dodgers fan from the beginning was that the team had Jackie Robinson, the first 'Negro' in the major leagues.
A boy cannot begin playing ball too early. I might almost say that while he is still creeping on all fours he should have a bouncing rubber ball.
I guess more players lick themselves that are ever licked by an opposing team. The first thing any man has to know is how to handle himself.
Your job as a baseball player is to come to the park ready to play every day, and the manager, it's his job to make those decisions about who plays.
You learn as a player not to listen to the criticism. Many of the people who put out that criticism might not be as accomplished, might not understand the game as well from the inside-out.
I had aches and pains when I played. No player is ever 100 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent. Guys that play 158 or 162 or 145, we are all in the same boat.
I've been asked to interview for many managing jobs, and I never said yes because I was never serious about it, and I thought it would be wrong to go through that process.
Whether it was Little League or playing with your brothers or sisters, that was always a problem. If I would lose - because I very rarely lost - then everything would go crazy.
You don't project yourself in the Hall of Fame as a player. It's only during that five-year period where people start asking about it, and it doesn't seem real until it happens.
