I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can’t remember.

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us – Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass – swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.

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.

The great thing about catchers is that they do a lot of different things, and they’re basically overlooked.

Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world’s champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man’s hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance – thrown hard and with precision.

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.

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve met a lot of baseball people, and I’ve learned to value people who talk – people who talk well and in long sentences and even long paragraphs.

Baseball’s absolute unpredictability makes amateurs of us all.