Quote

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

To me, baseball has always been a reflection of life. Like life, it adjusts. It survives everything.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

Baseball is the life.

Baseball is a lot like life. It's a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life.

Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is.

I think it puts baseball back on the map as a sport. It's America's pastime and just look at everyone coming out to the ballpark. It has been an exciting year.

It's a wonderful feeling to be a bridge to the past and to unite generations. The sport of baseball does that, and I am just a part of it.

That's one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn't begun to batter optimism.