quotations about baseball
Baseball is a curious anomaly in American life. It seems to have been ingrained in people in their childhood.... Baseball is, after all, a boy's game, and children are innocent of evil. So even adults who are prejudiced revert to their childhood when they encounter a baseball player and they react with the purity of little children.
JACKIE ROBINSON
Baseball Has Done It
Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth as the nation has. It is a cerebral game, designed as geometrically as the city of Washington itself, born out of the Enlightenment and the philosophies so beloved of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. It is to games what the Federalist Papers are to books; orderly, reasoned, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.
MICHAEL NOVAK
The Joy of Sports
Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what it most truly is, is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps. There is nothing wrong with that. Man needs a place to vent his angers other than in direct confrontation with his fellow man.
WILLIE MAYS
attributed, Willie Mays
Baseball has two main elements that grip the fan. Like many other sports, it has great subtlety and it has individual heroism. As an American child you're mesmerized by both. As a boy you play baseball all summer long, all day long and into the evening, so long as there is still light enough to be able to see the ball. Then as an adult, you watch it and follow it for the rest of your life, still like a child.
PHILIP ROTH
Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013
Baseball is the American success story. It is the only avenue of escape for thousands of boys born into a dreay environment of poverty. It is, moreover, a great common ground on which bartenders and bishops, clergymen and bosses, bankers and laborers meet with true equality and understanding. The game has proved in everyday language that democracy works.
J. G. TAYLOR SPINK
attributed, Seasons of Change
Baseball is a spectacle; people come to see it because it is artificial, because it distills reality into a customary form. Yet the very fact that they come to see it makes it real. A culture is its carnivals, its stage plays, its sideshows and circuses.
TIMOTHY MORRIS
Making the Team
Baseball through the years is a tapestry through time; it beats to the rhythm of the culture.
VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV, JR.
Baseball Is America: Origins and History: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit Redux
Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand.
ROGER ANGELL
On the Ball
Some argue that baseball is a subtler game than football, which, if true, may be part of the reason many Americans find baseball boring.
ARTHUR ASA BERGER
Media Analysis Techniques
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
JACQUES BARZUN
attributed, Game Plans
Baseball is like an old friend.
BRIAN MARTIN
Baseball's Creation Myth
Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.
DONALD HALL
Fathers Playing Catch with Sons
If you can't enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.
DANIEL OKRENT & HARRIS LEWINE
The Ultimate Baseball Book
If you don’t think it’s the greatest game, leave, cause you’re missing it all. It’s the greatest game there ever was. It is the only game where nobody cares where you come from. And nobody cares who you are. They only care, can you play. That’s all this game is. It’s a game of having fun.
SPARKY ANDERSON
Hall of Fame induction speech
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops ... And summer is gone.
A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI
attributed, The Business of Baseball
The fundamental reason for the popularity of the game is the fact that it is a national safety valve. Voltaire says that there are no real pleasures without real needs. Now a young, ambitious and growing nation needs to "let off steam." Baseball furnishes the opportunity. Therefore, it is a real pleasure.... That is what baseball does for humanity. It serves the same purpose as a revolution in Central America or a thunderstorm on a hot day.... A tonic, an exercise, a safety-valve, baseball is second only to Death as a leveler. So long as it remains our national game, America will abide no monarchy, and anarchy will be too slow.
ALLEN SANGREE
attributed, The Ultimate Baseball Book
Football may be the "disco beat" of modern sports, but baseball is Chopin or the mystique of Mozart. Every baseball game is new with the pristine beauty of the notes of Beethoven's Ninth.
PHILLIP GERSTLE
attributed, Baseball's Greatest Quotations
One of the greatest things about baseball is that you do not need much to play. All you need is a bat and a ball--not even a glove--and a whole lot of imagination.
DAVID ORTIZ
Big Papi: My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits
What's true for the people who play baseball is true in different ways for those of us who mostly just watch it. On the one hand, a baseball stadium becomes a kind of home for many of us who go often. Whether it's a big league stadium where you can leave your peanut shells scattered beneath your seat or a high school field where you know the person who chalks the base paths every Thursday, it's a personal space. You can keep score with your private notation system, sound of authoritatively on what Bud Selig is doing wrong, or tell an ump that he's missed a call even when you are 140 feet and a bad angle away from the plate.
ERIC BRONSON
Baseball and Philosophy