quotations about baseball
To the fierce, ardent, leather-lunged Professional fan, baseball is life itself, a motive for breathing, the yeast that helps his spirit, as well as his gorge, rise.
JIM BROSNAN
The Atlantic, Apr. 1964
Sliding headfirst is the safest way to get to the next base, I think. And the fastest. You don't lose your momentum.... And there is one more important reason that I slide headfirst. It gets my picture in the newspaper.
PETE ROSE
Pete Rose: My Life in Baseball
Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past.
ALBERT THEODORE POWERS
The Business of Baseball
Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.
PETER UEBERROTH
New York Times, May 12, 1985
Look! Look at the yellow neon running up the foul poles.... Watch the players, white against green like froth on waves of ocean. Look around at the fans, count their warts just as they count ours; look at them waddle and stuff their faces and cheer with their mouths full. We're not just ordinary people, we're a congregation. Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual, as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is a ritual.
W. P. KINSELLA
Shoeless Joe
I'm lucky to have the opportunity to play baseball. However, I'm not lucky because I'm a good baseball player. I like to think that I am good because I worked hard and am dedicated to the game.
PETE ROSE
Pete Rose: My Life in Baseball
For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
DONALD HALL
Ford Times, April 1977
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
JOHN CHEEVER
The New Yorker, Sep. 28, 1953
Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is.
BOB FELLER
Now Pitching
Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.
GEORGE F. WILL
Men at Work
Baseball, we understand once again, is spare and rigorous by nature, and is also somehow right. We can ignore it or hate it, if that is our choice, but we must take it as it is. It cannot be better.
ROGER ANGELL
attributed, Baseball
Baseball is such a game of hope. Anything can happen--and often does--usually in the most tension-filled times. Maybe your team is up by a run or two with only three outs to get. Why does it seem that those three outs are always the toughest three to get? Or maybe you are on the other side of the ledger with your team being down a run or two with three outs to go. Doesn't hope spring eternal if you get a base runner or two on?
PETER G. DOUMIT
What I Know about Baseball is What I Know about Life
Little Boy, in a baseball hat
Stands in the field with his ball and bat
Says I am the greatest player of them all
Puts his bat on his shoulder and he tosses up his ball
KENNY ROGERS
"The Greatest"
Baseball is as American as turkey and apple pie. Baseball is a tradition that passes from generation to generation. Baseball crosses social barriers, creates community spirit, and is much more than a private enterprise. Baseball is a national pastime.
HARRY SEYMOUR CRUMP
injunction issued by Minnesota Superior Court, Nov. 16, 2002
Baseball is purer than life; it's symmetrical, fair, and dignified. There's no debating what happened: it happened.
MARVIN COHEN
Baseball the Beautiful
I always say, the only time you gotta worry about getting booed is when you're wearing a white uniform. And I've never been booed wearing a white uniform.
PETE ROSE
attributed, The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball
The world of baseball is fan-made. The fan's interest is sentimental in the sense that sentimentality is an emotion in excess of its cause. His interest is also coincidental, for baseball just happens to offer the best means to obtain a wishful end. The tensions of a changing world may reproduce new symptom formations. The neurotic compromise that the fan makes between his interest in Baseball and his inability to attain absolute pleasure from it could produce a regressive turn to other sports. Like football, that blood game.
JIM BROSNAN
The Atlantic, Apr. 1964
The only thing I can do is play baseball. I have to play ball. It's the only thing I know.
MICKEY MANTLE
attributed, Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son
Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.
BILL VEECK
attributed, Joy in Mudville
Baseball is a game that boys play for fun and men play for keeps.
BARNEY MANN
attributed, Making the Team