quotations about baseball
Baseball is the real game of the Nation, because it contains all the essentials of manhood, as manhood is understood in the United States, and the game has so many good qualities that it is spreading all over the earth. So long as the little sons of Uncle Sam ... play baseball, we are going to have a healthy, clean, industrious country, for as an exercise it is the best sport known.... It trains the mind as well as the body, and there is little element of danger. It can safely be played by boys of five and men of fifty. The heart, the lungs, the legs, the arms and the eye are called into play in every second the game is on; that is why baseball has been the favorite pastime of the American small boy; it is a developer par excellence.
CHIEF BENDER
Boy's Life, Aug. 1912
Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.
JOHN THORN
"Baseball: Our Game"
Am I still in uniform? Then I ain't retired.
PETE ROSE
St. Petersburg Times, Mar. 23, 1989
My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and sitting down and watching him work.
SPARKY ANDERSON
attributed, Late Innings
One of the great things about baseball is that it can be played almost anywhere.
JOSH LEVENTHAL
Baseball Yesterday & Today
Baseball is only a pastime, a sport, an entertainment, a way of blowing off steam. But it is also the national game, with an appeal to Americans of every race, color, creed, sex or political opinion. It unites Americans in the common cause of rooting for the home team.
JACKIE ROBINSON
Baseball Has Done It
The average age of our bench is deceased.
TOMMY LASORDA
attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations
Learning to hit a baseball is like learning a foreign language. If you want to speak a foreign language without an accent, you have to do it when you're young. After a certain age, it's too late.
JOHN RITTER
The Boy Who Saved Baseball
You don't want to get beat, number one, and you hate getting shutout, number two, and even worse, no hits.
DUSTY BAKER
postgame interview, Oct. 6, 2010
The state of baseball is the barometric pressure of America's soul.
VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV
JR., Baseball Is America
Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.
JOE GARAGIOLA
Baseball Is a Funny Game
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 universal language. Catch the ball, throw the ball, hit the ball.
PETE ROSE
My Prison Without Bars
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 is indulgent about facades, preferring them to reality. The game has surrounded itself with euphemisms, like a junkyard with an ivy-covered fence. Baseball is peanuts and hot dogs and heart and team spirit and camaraderie and good feeling and a way of life second in wholesomeness only to the Boy Scouts. Of course, it is none of these things, and one only has to examine the fortunes and personnel of a single team over a period of time to understand how shimmery the facade is.
LEONARD SHECTER
Life Magazine, Aug. 9, 1968
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
The best words--most fun words--in our language are "play ball." Those words conjure up home runs and strikeouts, extra innings and double plays. "Play ball" is what baseball is all about--its call to arms--and there isn't a baseball fan in the USA or Canada who isn't a little excited over the beginning of a new season.
PETER UEBERROTH
USA Today, Apr. 4, USA Today, Apr. 4, 1986
Baseball is like war. It's no pink tea. Mollycoddlers had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy. A survival of the fittest.
TY COBB
attributed, Baseball in Detroit: 1886-1968
Over the years I've heard that baseball is like a poker game, that marriage is like baseball, that sex is like baseball, that baseball is like Darwinism, that baseball is like war, and--most of all--that baseball is really, when you think about it, a lot like life. I've caught myself starting to say that once or twice myself, and the comparison is tempting. But it's just not true: baseball is nothing like life, which is why it's so great.
EMMA SPAN
90% of the Game Is Half Mental: And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom
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