Losing is the bane and bugbear of every professional athlete's existence, but in baseball the monster seems to hang closer than in other sports, its chilly claws and foul breath palpable around the neck hairs of the infielder bending for his crosshand scoop or the reliever slipping his first two fingers off-center on the ball seams before delivering his two-and-two cut fastball.

Infield practice is more mystic ritual than preparation, encouraging the big-leaguer, no less than the duffer in the stands, to believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that playing ball is a snap.

What really makes baseball so hard is it's retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.

Little boys are still playing the game [baseball], more little girls are playing, and it is still the world's most interesting game, a duel, a chess match, a foot race, a gymnastics exhibition, that rare opportunity for individuals to be recognized within a group effort.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.

Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.