quotations about baseball
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
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
Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand.
ROGER ANGELL
On the Ball
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
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
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
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"
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
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
To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.
JOHN CHEEVER
The New Yorker, Sep. 28, 1953
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
JACQUES BARZUN
attributed, Game Plans
The fundamental reason for the popularity of the game is the fact that it is a national safety valve. Voltaire says that there are no real pleasures without real needs. Now a young, ambitious and growing nation needs to "let off steam." Baseball furnishes the opportunity. Therefore, it is a real pleasure.... That is what baseball does for humanity. It serves the same purpose as a revolution in Central America or a thunderstorm on a hot day.... A tonic, an exercise, a safety-valve, baseball is second only to Death as a leveler. So long as it remains our national game, America will abide no monarchy, and anarchy will be too slow.
ALLEN SANGREE
attributed, The Ultimate Baseball Book
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
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit Redux
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
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
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
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