I had never been to the playoffs, and it was exciting. The fans went through the roof. They were excited about the whole team. It was great to be traded to a city like Chicago, which was a lot like Boston.

Pitching... sometimes I did so poorly, it brought me to tears.

You aren't going to stick around long with just two pitches.

The thing that got me over the hump was accepting that I had to do whatever I could to stay in the game.

When I started finishing games and coming off the field shaking hands, it was a beautiful thing. I mean, you start seeing that you're an important part of the team.

It took me a few years to realize that throwing harder wasn't always better.

Sooner or later you learn that you belong in the big leagues, and that makes you calm down.

But through experience I learned to control my body and locate the ball.

That first year in Chicago was one of the most memorable in my career. Getting traded rejuvenated me, and I had something to prove. I wanted to show them what I could do.

Later, I could take something off my slider and I could make my fastball sink, so I really had four pitches.

Then you figure out that if you don't throw it as hard as you can, you can put it where you want. It's more important where you put it.

I also think that I had great mechanics.

I was a starter and did some good things there, and then I got a chance to prove myself as a closer. Because of that opportunity, I was blessed with the honor of being elected to the Hall of Fame.

I think today the players are too nice to one another, but that might change with the unbalanced schedule, with teams playing each other more and more. When you face each other that much, with that much at stake, something's bound to happen.

I had never been to the playoffs, and it was exciting. The fans went through the roof. They were excited about the whole team. It was great to be traded to a city like Chicago, which was a lot like Boston.

I'm proud of the fact that I pitched almost 3,300 innings.

Tony knew me both as an athlete and as a person. He cared for me like a father.

When I first came up, the bullpen was pretty much where they put the guys who couldn't start.

I always had the attitude that I wanted to throw a no-hitter every game.

I was in good control of my body, and I kept my head still.

My career spanned the era when relievers started to become more important.

I can't recall too much about pitching, but I do remember that I was anxious to get it over with. I just wanted to get that first game over with and go from there.

But more important than personal awards is winning the World Series. That's the max that anyone could ask for. Let alone to have the ball in your in your glove for the final out of the World Series. That was the ultimate.

They developed a platform for me to put up another 12 years, and that was my ticket to Cooperstown. Those were the best years of my life. It was like magic.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

Boston is the engine of the state's economy.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

When I go abroad I always sail from Boston because it is such a pleasant place to get away from.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

Let's use the energy of this historic year to propel us toward our shared vision of a greater Boston.

I got private lessons in keyboard at Julliard, before New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

And that's the mistake that was made with Steel Pier. Roger was caught between a rock and hard place. It would have cost a couple of million dollars more to take it to Boston or someplace first. So we opened about a month too early.

A Boston man is the east wind made flesh.

Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational and happy.

They played Boston. They played at the Boston Tea Party and through an amazing chain of events I got to hang out with them backstage even though I was underage.