You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.

Major League Baseball is a national institution and we take our responsibilities seriously when it comes to how the game affects the lives of American youth.

Major League Baseball has always recognized the influence that our stars can have on the youth of America. As such, we are concerned that recent revelations and allegations of steroid use have been sending a terrible message to young people.

Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.

When you play with boys, it's different because of their speed, the way they handle the ball and their strength. I really learned a lot from that and it has also made me a better player.

Unfortunately, here in the Dominican, a lot of the time kids just quit school at 10, 11, 12 and play baseball full-time. It’s great for the kids who make it because they become superstars and [make] millions of dollars in the big leagues. But for 98 kids out of a hundred, it results in a kid who is 18, 19 with no education. So it’s kind of a win-lose here in the Dominican.

Anytime I feel something is wrong I'm gonna say something. Baseball has changed in many ways since I first came to the big leagues. Ballplayers feel they can speak up much more now than they did then. I spoke up even then. [...] I didn't like some of the things the white players said to Roberts so I said some things to them that they didn't like.

Baseball always has been and always will be a game demanding team play. You can have the nine greatest individual ball players in the world, but if they don't play together the club won't be worth a dime.

In Puerto Rico, we like to laugh and talk before a game. Then we go out and play as hard as we can to win. Afterwards, we laugh and talk again. But in America, baseball is much more of a business. Play well and you get pats on the back and congratulations. Play bad and no pats and maybe nobody talks to you.

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always opened... We weren't something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

When I played ball, I didn't play for fun. To me it wasn't parchesi played under parchesi rules. Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest. Every man in the game, from the minors on up, is not only fighting against the other side, but he's trying to hold onto his own job against those on his own bench who'd love to take it away. Why deny this? Why minimize it? Why not boldly admit it? Many a writer has said that I was "unfair." Well, that's not my understanding of the word. When my toes were stepped on, I stepped right back.

I learned to play (baseball) on the streets in the Dominican Republic when I was 8 yrs old.

Somebody say once that I like to goof off; that I'm lazy because I don't play winter ball and make a habit of reporting late to spring training. What these fellows don't know is that I have no time for winter ball. When I return home to Puerto Rico after the baseball season, I open my camp right away. It is a camp for boys, where they can come and learn how to play baseball. They come from all ages and get a lot of help. Cepeda spends some time with me. He teaches how to play first base. José Santiago shows them how to pitch. 'Chito' Rios, he comes from Mayagüez and gives base running instruction. Even Frank Lane has been there and talked to my kids. Jim Brown has been there, and Tommy Nobis, to talk football, although most of our kids have little interest in football. But they like to hear these fellows. Bill Russell has been there; so have Oscar Robertson and all the Harlem Globetrotters. The boys love it, and I really believe it has meant a lot in the development of some fine young men for later life.

When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a baseball player. This is something I think about. The more I think about it, I'm convinced that God wanted me to play baseball.