Baseball is more than a game. It's like life played out on a field.
Things happen in baseball, even if, in theory, it's something you don't do. Stats are a tool, but it doesn't mean that's how a game is being played at that moment. There's more than one way to win a game, or have a winning team.
I think of going back to the sports field again, and let's take a baseball game. Well, you have cracked out a grounder and you put in your last ounce of energy and you just happen to make first base. But you don't stop there. First base is the beginning. Now you call on all your alertness, your skill, your energy - and you count on your teammates, you count on the people that are working with you. And the purpose of that getting on first base was to get you around to count a run.
I wouldn't trade my life with anybody else. I played during the golden day of baseball, back when it was a game and when it was fun.
I came up in 1941 and I played against men who played in the 1930s. I stayed until 1963 playing against men who will be playing in the 1970s. So I think I can feel qualified to say that baseball really was a great game, and baseball is really a great game, and baseball will always be a great game.
We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game, and we liked to play it.
To be the first player to do it three consecutive years (fifty or more home runs), you go back through the thousands of power hitters who played this game and nobody has ever done it, and I can sit here and say I'm the first. I'm pretty proud of that.
I played baseball up until my freshman year of high school. That was my main sport. I played third base.
Making games look more photorealistic is not the only means of improving the game experience. I know, on this point, I risk being misunderstood, so remember, I am a man who once programmed a baseball game with no baseball players. If anyone appreciates graphics, it's me!
I think the last game console I had was Super Nintendo. I remember once I played the Sega Genesis. But Super Nintendo was my last game device. I played outside more. I liked kickball and baseball.
My baseball career ended in college.I played on the freshman team, but was becoming more drawn to intellectualism than athleticism, and so I gave up baseball, and it was perfect timing because baseball was going to give up me very soon.
When I joined a baseball club, the boys of my own age, and a little older, played in the first nine, those younger than myself played in the second, and those still younger in the third, and I played with them.
It's sort of like baseball - the more you know about baseball, the more you get into a baseball game. NASCAR is the same way.
I want more runs in baseball itself. When you were raised on a sandlot, where the scores ran twenty-three to sixty-one, you yearn for something more than a five to two score. You know as well as I do that the excitement, temperature and decibels of any big game today rise instantly when there is someone on base. It reaches ecstasy when somebody makes a run.
But wherever I was I played baseball. That's all I lived for. When I sat up on the front seat of that covered wagon next to my father, I was wearing a baseball glove. That showed anybody who was interested where I wanted to go.
We had a normal childhood. I played baseball, and we played violin in orchestras three times a week. I learned more from that than anything else.