quotations about baseball
Baseball is essentially a 19th century sport that is no longer congruent with contemporary American cultural dynamics and thus seems terribly slow and boring to many people. Baseball games are now events at which to drink beer and relax, and the ambience at baseball games is considerably different from what one finds at football games--especially crucial games, where ancient antagonisms or bowl bids hang in the balance.
ARTHUR ASA BERGER
Media Analysis Techniques
The first thing baseball wants to do is make you a superstar and then say that you owe baseball something. I don't owe baseball anything. Baseball owes me.
HANK AARON
Jet Magazine, Sep. 5, 1986
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 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
For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
DONALD HALL
Ford Times, April 1977
I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.
WILLIE MAYS
Newsweek, Feb. 5, 1979
If you don’t think it’s the greatest game, leave, cause you’re missing it all. It’s the greatest game there ever was. It is the only game where nobody cares where you come from. And nobody cares who you are. They only care, can you play. That’s all this game is. It’s a game of having fun.
SPARKY ANDERSON
Hall of Fame induction speech
Some argue that baseball is a subtler game than football, which, if true, may be part of the reason many Americans find baseball boring.
ARTHUR ASA BERGER
Media Analysis Techniques
Baseball is the American success story. It is the only avenue of escape for thousands of boys born into a dreay environment of poverty. It is, moreover, a great common ground on which bartenders and bishops, clergymen and bosses, bankers and laborers meet with true equality and understanding. The game has proved in everyday language that democracy works.
J. G. TAYLOR SPINK
attributed, Seasons of Change
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"
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 has two main elements that grip the fan. Like many other sports, it has great subtlety and it has individual heroism. As an American child you're mesmerized by both. As a boy you play baseball all summer long, all day long and into the evening, so long as there is still light enough to be able to see the ball. Then as an adult, you watch it and follow it for the rest of your life, still like a child.
PHILIP ROTH
Le Monde, special issue, Jan. 2013
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
Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.
PETER UEBERROTH
New York Times, May 12, 1985
If you can't enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.
DANIEL OKRENT & HARRIS LEWINE
The Ultimate Baseball Book
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
JACQUES BARZUN
attributed, Game Plans
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 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
Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past.
ALBERT THEODORE POWERS
The Business of Baseball
Baseball is like an old friend.
BRIAN MARTIN
Baseball's Creation Myth