Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns. – John Leonard, New York Times, 2 November 1975

Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. – Steve Busby, in Washington Post, 8 July 1974