quotations about baseball
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
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
Baseball is like an old friend.
BRIAN MARTIN
Baseball's Creation Myth
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
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
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
Baseball is a game that boys play for fun and men play for keeps.
BARNEY MANN
attributed, Making the Team
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
Baseball is purer than life; it's symmetrical, fair, and dignified. There's no debating what happened: it happened.
MARVIN COHEN
Baseball the Beautiful
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