After I'd hit a home run and took my position in the field, the fans in the bleachers began throwing packages of tobacco at me. I stuffed them in my pocket.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A young fella snuck out on to the field somehow, but when he was coming up to give me a hug, he got smoked by the guard. He was lucky the guy didn't break his ribs.
Where the ball went was up to heaven. Sometimes I threw the ball clean up into the stands.
When I was a boy, I had a baseball team of my own. We played on a vacant lot between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets. I had a little menagerie of my own, some pigeons, guinea pigs, and so on. On Saturday mornings, I had to take my music lesson. Then the members of my team used to come see my menagerie.
I pitched and I played the outfield.
My dad introduced me to baseball. Then one of my friends asked if I could play on a team; my dad said I could, and I just fell in love with the game.
I wanted to play baseball!
I was a big baseball player, and my passion in life, in third grade, was collecting baseball cards. That was my childhood thing.
When I stepped into the box, I felt the at-bat belonged to me. Everybody else was there for my convenience. The pitcher was there to throw me a ball to hit. The catcher was there to throw it back to him if he didn't give me what I wanted the first time. And the umpire was lucky that he was close enough to watch.
When the ball dropped in 1999, I was holding dough and champagne in my hands and holding my kids.
When I came up to bat with three men on and two outs in the ninth, I looked in the other team's dugout and they were already in street clothes.