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1 " The sound of thunder awake me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mother took Buster and Helen to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing water out the window. Mother came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop. " To heck with praying!" I shouted. " Bail, dammit, bail!" Mom look mortified. I could tell she thought I'd probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a little shocked at it myself, but with the water rising so fast, the situation was dire. We had lit the kerosene lamp, and we could see the walls of the dugout were beginning to sag inward. If Mom had pitched in and helped, there was a chance we might have been able to save the dugout - not a good chance, but a fighting chance. Apache and Lupe and I couldn't do it on our own, though, and when the ceiling started to cave, we grabbed Mom's walnut headboard and pulled it through the door just as the dugout collapsed in on itself, burying everything.Afterward, I was pretty aggravated with Mom. She kept saying that the flood was God's will and we had to submit to it. But I didn't see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail - the gumption to try to save ourselves - isn't that what he wanted us to do? "
2 " You’re not going to always hit a home run in life. You’re going to strike out! You’re going to walk to the dugout of life, frustrated, while spectators chirp your name in judgment. They’re afraid to even get on the field, and you know it. The fact that you get back up there, unafraid, going after that next home run, makes you the person you are. "
― Ron Baratono , The Writings of Ron Baratono
3 " The walk-off win provides one of baseball’s most thrilling outbursts, launching a couple dozen tense teammates out of the dugout into a frenzied mosh pit of elation. "
― Dirk Lammers , Baseball's No-Hit Wonders: More Than a Century of Pitching's Greatest Feats