In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he's losing; nobody wants you to quit when you're ahead.

I think it was one of the greatest times ever in the world to play baseball. Television was in its infancy. Breaking the color barrier,

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.