I signed a very modest $3,000 bonus with the Braves in Milwaukee. And my old man didn’t have that kinda money to put out.

Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

Money is a strange business. People who haven’t got it aim it strongly. People who have are full of troubles.

When I looked at the third base coach, he turned his back on me.

In my opinion, baseball is as big a business as anything there is. It has to be a business, the way it is conducted.

The bat is not a toy, it’s a weapon. It gives me everything in life, which helps me to do everything on the field.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

I didn’t mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.

Phil Niekro and his brother were pitching against each other in Atlanta. Their parents were sitting right behind home plate. I saw their folks more that day than they did the whole weekend.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

My mother graduated from high school at 15 and went to work to support the family because the eldest son went to college.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

I still enjoy watching a batter successfully cross home plate, but nothing thrills me more than seeing the Holy Spirit at work in hearts as the Gospel is carried into stadiums, across the airwaves, and around the world.

I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue. When we’re young, we don’t understand why our parents bug us so much with school and doing homework, but it’s a blessing to have that support at home.

I hope the fans have enjoyed listening as much as I’ve enjoyed doing the games. I don’t ever go to the park where I don’t have a good day. I don’t like losing. But I don’t think I ever go to the park where I have a bad day. I don’t think once.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned.

Any teammate of mine that had a kid and a boy that was capable of playing baseball, I think I set a terrific example of ‚Don’t do this‘ and ‚Don’t do that.‘ And that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.

My family supported me a lot and my father flew in to stay with me from time to time.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It’s gossip.

When I was 5, some financial things happened, and I moved seven times in a year. We moved from apartment to apartment, sometimes living with friends. My mom would always say, ‚Don’t get comfortable, because we may not be here long.‘

My mother raised me with God. We were poor financially, but we were rich spiritually.

If a guy hits .300 every year, what does he have to look forward to? I always tried to stay around .190, with three or four RBI. And I tried to get them all in September. That way I always had something to talk about during the winter.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock trade.

If we do not lift up women and families, everyone will fall short.

Career highlights? I had two – I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax and I got out of a rundown against the Mets.

All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.

I won’t be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.

Before broadcasting for 50-some years, I did TV, played 10 years in the big leagues, won a world championship – and played a big part in that, too, letting the Cardinals inject me with hepatitis. Takes a big man to do that.

I had been playing for a while, and I asked Louisville Slugger to send me a dozen flame treated bats. But when I got it, I realized they had sent me a box of ashes.

It would make everything I worked for meaningless if baseball is integrated but political parties were segregated.

A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‚Mad Men‘ episode.

How do you catch a knuckleball? You wait until it stops rolling, then go pick it up.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

In 1962 I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the bigs.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

I hope to play until I’m, like, 38 or something, and that’s a lot of years in the game and a lot of travel and a lot of sacrifice on my family’s part.

The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.

A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.

I declared bankruptcy, and that was the worst thing I ever should have done.

My mother never gave up one me. I messed up in school so much they were sending me home, but my mother sent me right back.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

There was a point where I really felt I had ‚penniless divorcee lone parent‘ tattooed on my head.

If I’d just tried for them dinky singles I could’ve batted around .600.

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn’t speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn’t speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

If I had been white with the things I did, they never would have allowed me to get out of baseball.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Reading isn’t good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn’t hit home runs. So I gave up reading.

Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.