BASEBALL QUOTES III

quotations about baseball

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points.

EDNA FERBER

"A Bush League Hero"


The great thing about baseball is that there's a crisis every day.

GABE PAUL

attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations


Baseball is impossible without psychology: impossible to play, and impossible to appreciate fully as a fan. The physical demands of the game are intense and the physical abilities of the players, as extraordinary as they are, cannot by themselves meet those demands. Working alone, even the fastest reflexes would be insufficient--the reflexes must be supported by the player's intellect. The player's intellect, in turn, is shaped by those cognitive and emotional forces that are the province of psychology.

MIKE STADLER

The Psychology of Baseball


Baseball is an American icon. It is the Statue of Liberty, the bald eagle, "In God We Trust," Mount Rushmore, ice cream, apple pie, hot dogs, and rally monkeys. BASEBALL IS AMERICA.

VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV

JR., Baseball Is America


Baseball is a lot more like life than life is. It's nine or more innings of struggle, against the game itself as much as the opponent. Take good swings at the right pitches and hits will come. Command the corners with quality pitches and you'll get hitters out. Good mechanics and good decisions, along with a little luck, produce victory. The obstacle is not the other team, not the problems in life, but how you approach the game.

RICHARD DAIGLE

Atlanta Magazine, July 2006


In spite of its varied and primarily English origins, baseball is American. Many of our dramas as a people are played out on baseball's stage. The game of baseball is simple, fair, and for eight months of every year served up daily. Three strikes and a batter is out. Three outs for each team every inning. Each team has as many chances to bat and to score as its opponent. Nine innings except in the case of a tie. All games are played until one team wins, even if the game lasts all day and all night. Baseball, among all major American sports, is the only game not limited by a clock. Very simple, very just. Everything else about baseball is surrounded by a hazy aura where America's soul can be found.

ALBERT THEODORE POWERS

The Business of Baseball


The seductiveness of baseball is that almost everyone with an abiding interest in it knows exactly how it should be played. And secretly believes that he could do it, if only God had seen fit to make him just a little bit less clumsy.

GEORGE V. HIGGINS

The Progress of the Seasons


With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions.

PETE ROSE

attributed, Sportswrit


Baseball is a game of long-suffering, and if one doesn't have the endurance to get over the hard times, bad hops, bad luck, failure-at-the-rate-of-70%-or-better hitting, and all the other things that happen that try one's patience, they won't last long in the game.

PETER G. DOUMIT

What I Know about Baseball is What I Know about Life


If basketball is checkers, baseball is chess--and the endless configurations of its statistics are quantum physics!

LIZ HARTMAN MUSIKER

The Smart Girl's Guide to Sports


One of the great things about baseball is that it can be played almost anywhere.

JOSH LEVENTHAL

Baseball Yesterday & Today


The structure of baseball is its art. It's a structure that admits of infinitely complicated possibilities and combinations, within the rigid framework of rules in common, of distances to fences, of worked-out angles, of human proportions. Man is the measure of all things. The Major League ballplayer is the measure of the distances on his field of trade. Given these, he must do or die, win or lose. It's the majesty that dignity imparts.

MARVIN COHEN

Baseball the Beautiful


Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple.

W. P. KINSELLA

Shoeless Joe


Baseball is something of a ballet, the trouble is that the music is substandard (they use pretty much the same score at the hockey rink) and the performers often spit tobacco juice all over the place.

DAVE SHIFLETT

Houston Chronicle, Apr. 29, 1990


Baseball is an art! A drama! A ballet without music! Let us give it a Greek chorus!

DEBORAH WILES

The Aurora County All-Stars


What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.

DAN SHAUGHNESSY

attributed, The Ultimate Baseball Book


Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.

HENRY KISSINGER

attributed, Baseball's Greatest Quotations


Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.

BILL LEE

Los Angeles Times, Feb. 3, 1977


Baseball is a pretty sight and a nice experience, win or lose, particularly if it is watched in a nice park.

DANIEL OKRENT & HARRIS LEWINE

The Ultimate Baseball Book


My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. As I realized years later, that is still the finest theory of hitting yet devised.

TOMMY LASORDA

The Artful Dodger