quotations about baseball
Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points.
EDNA FERBER
"A Bush League Hero"
With the money I'm making, I should be playing two positions.
PETE ROSE
attributed, Sportswrit
Baseball is impossible without psychology: impossible to play, and impossible to appreciate fully as a fan. The physical demands of the game are intense and the physical abilities of the players, as extraordinary as they are, cannot by themselves meet those demands. Working alone, even the fastest reflexes would be insufficient--the reflexes must be supported by the player's intellect. The player's intellect, in turn, is shaped by those cognitive and emotional forces that are the province of psychology.
MIKE STADLER
The Psychology of Baseball
Baseball is a game of long-suffering, and if one doesn't have the endurance to get over the hard times, bad hops, bad luck, failure-at-the-rate-of-70%-or-better hitting, and all the other things that happen that try one's patience, they won't last long in the game.
PETER G. DOUMIT
What I Know about Baseball is What I Know about Life
In spite of its varied and primarily English origins, baseball is American. Many of our dramas as a people are played out on baseball's stage. The game of baseball is simple, fair, and for eight months of every year served up daily. Three strikes and a batter is out. Three outs for each team every inning. Each team has as many chances to bat and to score as its opponent. Nine innings except in the case of a tie. All games are played until one team wins, even if the game lasts all day and all night. Baseball, among all major American sports, is the only game not limited by a clock. Very simple, very just. Everything else about baseball is surrounded by a hazy aura where America's soul can be found.
ALBERT THEODORE POWERS
The Business of Baseball
Baseball is an American icon. It is the Statue of Liberty, the bald eagle, "In God We Trust," Mount Rushmore, ice cream, apple pie, hot dogs, and rally monkeys. BASEBALL IS AMERICA.
VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV
JR., Baseball Is America
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
What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.
DAN SHAUGHNESSY
attributed, The Ultimate Baseball Book
Baseball is a lot more like life than life is. It's nine or more innings of struggle, against the game itself as much as the opponent. Take good swings at the right pitches and hits will come. Command the corners with quality pitches and you'll get hitters out. Good mechanics and good decisions, along with a little luck, produce victory. The obstacle is not the other team, not the problems in life, but how you approach the game.
RICHARD DAIGLE
Atlanta Magazine, July 2006
If basketball is checkers, baseball is chess--and the endless configurations of its statistics are quantum physics!
LIZ HARTMAN MUSIKER
The Smart Girl's Guide to Sports
Baseball is something of a ballet, the trouble is that the music is substandard (they use pretty much the same score at the hockey rink) and the performers often spit tobacco juice all over the place.
DAVE SHIFLETT
Houston Chronicle, Apr. 29, 1990
Baseball is a team sport, encoding in its formula for success social and intellectual abilities that individual sports do not require.
TIMOTHY MORRIS
Making the Team
Baseball is a pretty sight and a nice experience, win or lose, particularly if it is watched in a nice park.
DANIEL OKRENT & HARRIS LEWINE
The Ultimate Baseball Book
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 theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. As I realized years later, that is still the finest theory of hitting yet devised.
TOMMY LASORDA
The Artful Dodger
Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head.
HENRY KISSINGER
attributed, Baseball's Greatest Quotations
Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple.
W. P. KINSELLA
Shoeless Joe
The great thing about baseball is that there's a crisis every day.
GABE PAUL
attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations
Baseball is an art! A drama! A ballet without music! Let us give it a Greek chorus!
DEBORAH WILES
The Aurora County All-Stars
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