quotations about baseball
The structure of baseball is its art. It's a structure that admits of infinitely complicated possibilities and combinations, within the rigid framework of rules in common, of distances to fences, of worked-out angles, of human proportions. Man is the measure of all things. The Major League ballplayer is the measure of the distances on his field of trade. Given these, he must do or die, win or lose. It's the majesty that dignity imparts.
MARVIN COHEN
Baseball the Beautiful
My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and sitting down and watching him work.
SPARKY ANDERSON
attributed, Late Innings
The seductiveness of baseball is that almost everyone with an abiding interest in it knows exactly how it should be played. And secretly believes that he could do it, if only God had seen fit to make him just a little bit less clumsy.
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
The Progress of the Seasons
The great thing about baseball is that there's a crisis every day.
GABE PAUL
attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations
One of the great things about baseball is that it can be played almost anywhere.
JOSH LEVENTHAL
Baseball Yesterday & Today
Baseball is as urban as sparring gladiators in the Colosseum, fighting each other, fighting lions, the scent of terror and failure and blood sickly-sweet in the air. Baseball is as urban as bearbaiting on the south bank of the Thames, a spectacle that competed for shillings with the words of Shakespeare and Jonson.
GEORGE VECSEY
Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game
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
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
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 average age of our bench is deceased.
TOMMY LASORDA
attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations
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
Baseball is a universal language. Catch the ball, throw the ball, hit the ball.
PETE ROSE
My Prison Without Bars
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 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 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 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 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
The state of baseball is the barometric pressure of America's soul.
VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV
JR., Baseball Is America
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 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