quotations about baseball
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
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
My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and sitting down and watching him work.
SPARKY ANDERSON
attributed, Late Innings
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 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"
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
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 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
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 a universal language. Catch the ball, throw the ball, hit the ball.
PETE ROSE
My Prison Without Bars
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
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
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 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
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