quotations about baseball
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
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
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
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
JACQUES BARZUN
attributed, Game Plans
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"
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past.
ALBERT THEODORE POWERS
The Business of Baseball
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
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 purer than life; it's symmetrical, fair, and dignified. There's no debating what happened: it happened.
MARVIN COHEN
Baseball the Beautiful