People Will Say I'm An Idealist. I

Winning Has A Joy And Discrete Purity To It That Cannot Be Replaced By Anything Else.

For Me, Baseball Is The Most Nourishing Game Outside Of Literature. They Both Are Re-tellings Of Human Experience.

The People Of America Care About Baseball, Not About Your Squalid Little Squabbles. Reassume Your Dignity And Remember That You (players During The 1981 Strike) Are The Temporary Custodians Of An Enduring Public Trust.

The Gods Have Fled, I Know. My Sense Is The Gods Have Always Been Essentially Absent. I Do Not Believe Human Beings Have Played Games Or Sports From The Beginning Merely To Summon Or To Please Or To Appease The Gods. If Anthropologists And Historians Believe That, It Is Because They Believe Whatever They Have Been Able To Recover About What Humankind Told The Gods Humankind Was Doing. I Believe We Have Played Games, And Watched Games, To Imitate The Gods, To Become Godlike In Our Worship Of Eachother And, Through Those Moments Of Transmutation, To Know For An Instant What The Gods Know.

We Have An Obligation To Spread Amateur Baseball Both At Home And Abroad. Building Up The Game At All Levels - Little League, Babe Ruth Leagues, The Colleges - Is In Our Own Self-interest. That's Where The Pool Of Talent Is - And Also Of Fans.