I grew up playing football and baseball and moved on to play college baseball, and, you know, as a kid, my dream was to play professional baseball.
My friends and family know I love playing baseball - Little League through college. And every year in the annual Congressional Baseball Game for charity played at Nationals Stadium.
I played three sports in high school, baseball, football and basketball. Baseball really helped me a lot.
One of my fun road trips was [when] a group of guys and I rented a tour bus and we started in Orlando and drove all the way around the country going to baseball games. That was an awesome trip because each night we would go to a new baseball stadium, watch a baseball game, get in the bus, wake up [in] the next city, go to another baseball game. We did this for a little while and it was great. We called that trip the Rats on the Bus and it was a fun trip.
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.
One of my heroes growing up was Jackie Robinson. My mom, an ardent baseball fan from whom I got my love of the game, had an old baseball card of his from the 1950s and told us his amazing story of courage in integrating baseball.
Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.
I think you come to watch baseball, and if you're a true fan, then you enjoy watching baseball. MLB tries to change this and change that, speed up the games, but baseball's baseball. You can't change it. It's America's pastime. It's the greatest game on earth. I don't really want to change it that much.
There are surprisingly few real students of the game in baseball; partly because everybody, my eighty-three year old grandmother included, thinks they learned all there was to know about it at puberty. Baseball is very beguiling that way.
Baseball was my main sport, but I peaked when I reached high school and so my baseball career stopped.
The first thing baseball wants to do is make you a superstar and then say that you owe baseball something. I don't owe baseball anything. Baseball owes me.
The rest of what I learned about baseball came from Peter Gammons, the Boston Globe`s best baseball writer when I was in high school.
Basketball has always been a sport I loved and grew up playing. For me, it was one of those things that... I guess baseball was just in my genes a little bit. I have a lot of cousins that played baseball. Basketball is not an easy sport - you definitely got to be gifted to play that game. I felt like I was pretty good at it, but my ability was better in baseball.
There are a lot of pitchers in baseball who should celebrate his life and what he did for the game of baseball.
Praise the name of baseball. The word will set captives free. The word will open the eyes of the blind. The word will raise the dead. Have you the word of baseball living inside you? Has the word of baseball become part of you? Do you live it, play it, digest it, forever? Let an old man tell you to make the word of baseball your life. Walk into the world and speak of baseball. Let the word flow through you like water, so that it may quicken the thirst of your fellow man.
In baseball, you have to remain calm, cool, and collected. In football, you can let out a little anger sometimes. It was a fun game, and I liked it, but I knew in my heart I was going to play baseball.