Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

Rodeoing is about the only sport you can't fix. You'd have to talk to the bulls and horses, and they wouldn't understand you.

No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?

Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Little boys are still playing the game [baseball], more little girls are playing, and it is still the world's most interesting game, a duel, a chess match, a foot race, a gymnastics exhibition, that rare opportunity for individuals to be recognized within a group effort.

Winning is not everything. It's the only thing.

Nolan Ryan is pitching a lot better now that he has his curve ball straightened out.

Very few blacks will take up golf until the requirement for plaid pants is dropped.

If the people don't want to come out to the park, nobody's gonna stop them.

A tie game is like kissing your sister.

Drive for show. But putt for dough.

We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.

Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.

Football's a difficult business and aren't they prima donnas. But it's a wonderful game.

I don't think we can win every game. Just the next one.

If Shakespeare had been in pro basketball, he never would have had time to write his soliloquies. He would have always been on a plane between Phoenix and Kansas City.

If I ever needed a brain transplant, I'd choose a sports-writer because I'd want a brain that had never been used.