Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.

I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.

Do we need to have 280 brands of breakfast cereal? No, probably not. But we have them for a reason - because some people like them. It's the same with baseball statistics.

Baseball does become slow sometimes. It's totally unnecessary. The - you can play baseball fast. You can play it slow, and for some reason, we have chosen to play it slow, you know, which is unfortunate, but nothing you can do about.

Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn't have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation, and those sort of stress-inducing activities... just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.

Bunting is usually a waste of time. The - generally, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, bunt is the only play in baseball that both sides applaud. The - if the home team bunts, you get a base. The home team applauds because they get an out, and the other team applauds because they get a base. So what does that tell you?

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Crime cases tend to be fascinating until you figure out what happened.

Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.

Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.

Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?

I have always been much better at asking questions than knowing what the answers were.

I like to feel that I understand little things about sports.

If a candidate for office starts talking about thinning the deer population or investing in barriers to reduce the number of deer on the highways, the other side will probably just ignore him, because they're not going to know what to say about it. But there is a chance that the issue will resonate with voters in an unexpected way.

In a crime story, the details become tremendously important - where the staircase was in relation to the bed, for example.

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

It's extremely damaging to a fair trial to have people reaching judgment about the case in the newspapers and on the radio before the facts are heard in a case.

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.

Our society is very, very good at developing certain types of skills and certain types of genius. We are fantastically good at identifying and developing athletic skills - better than we are, really, at almost anything else. We are quite good at developing and rewarding inventiveness.

Professionalism in law has brought us the O.J. Simpson case in lieu of justice.

Professionalism in medicine has given us medial miracles for the affluent but hospitals that will charge $35 for aspirin.

Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

The fact is that everybody around a college basketball game - the coaches, the announcers, even the referees at a lower level - calculates when the game is really over. They calculate it with intuition and guesswork.

There are many things that you can't measure. But the great fun of what I do for a living is figuring out ways to measure things that people previously considered intangible.

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

Well, stealing bases adds some runs but very few, and you lose most of the runs that you gain by having runners caught stealing.

When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you - period.

The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well.

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

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

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.

Whenever I wasn't watching the planes, I was playing community baseball, football, or something like that.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Baseball is a team game.

I never ride just to ride. I ride to catch a fox. I play baseball to make the team.

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.

I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?

After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.

The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things. If they ask me about 1989, I'll tell them I had amnesia.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.

Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.

I don't know what you guys say, but at home, life is way different from baseball.

Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.