quotations about baseball
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 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
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
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
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
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
Am I still in uniform? Then I ain't retired.
PETE ROSE
St. Petersburg Times, Mar. 23, 1989
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"
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
The average age of our bench is deceased.
TOMMY LASORDA
attributed, The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations
Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.
JOE GARAGIOLA
Baseball Is a Funny Game
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 a universal language. Catch the ball, throw the ball, hit the ball.
PETE ROSE
My Prison Without Bars
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
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
I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.
WILLIE MAYS
Newsweek, Feb. 5, 1979
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 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 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 state of baseball is the barometric pressure of America's soul.
VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV
JR., Baseball Is America