"Mr. Kojiru Suzuki threw a sinker on the outside part of the plate. I followed the ball perfectly. I could almost feel myself waiting for its precise break before I let myself come forward. When I made contact, I felt like I was scooping the ball outward and upward. The ball rose slowly and steadily in the night sky, lit by Korakuen's bright lights. I could follow it all the way as it lazily reached its height and seemed to linger there in the haze, and then slowly began it's descent into the right-field stands."

"When a [Samurai] warrior killed himself, he needed an assistant who would finish the job by cutting his head off. The task was always left to a trusted and highly skilled swordsman, because this had to be done with one clean, perfect stroke. If the stroke was not perfect, the result would be a horrible mess. I approached the task of hitting a baseball in the same manner."

"This summer (1977), a left-hand-swinging half-Chinese thirty-seven-year-old slugger named Sadaharu Oh struck the seven-hundred-and-fifty-sixth home run of his career, while playing for the Yomiuri Giants in Japan, and thus surpassed (in a way) Hank Aaron's lifetime mark; the qualifying parenthesis suggests that Japanese ballparks and Japanese pitchers are not all of major-league dimensions-a fact that the wonderful Oh amdmitted when he politely murmered '"I don't think I would do as well in American baseball."' - Roger Angell