Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye.

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

You may glory in a team triumphant... But you fall in love with a team in defeat.

Horse racing is animated roulette.

Tennis and golf are best played, not watched.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing it's writing.

Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.