Baseball

I once loved this game, but after being traded four times, I realize that it's nothing but a business. I treat my horses better than the owners treat us. Its a shame they've destroyed my love for the game.

— Baseball

I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything. It's just very beautiful to watch.

— Baseball

Baseball is a simple game. If you have good players and if you keep them in the right frame of mind, then the manager is a success. The players make the manager. It's never the other way.

— Baseball

The game of baseball is like wrestling with your dad in that, at any given point, your dad will make you feel, "I got him." But as soon as you do a cheap elbow and have the idea, "I'm going to take advantage of this situation," before you know it, you are on your back and feeling his entire weight and he's staring right in your eyes going, "Always remember that at any given time I can do this."

— Baseball

Baseball can be summed up in one word — youneverknow.

— Baseball

Baseball is easy to fathom, not like football, which people explain to me ay great length and i understand for one brief moment before it all falls apart in my brain and looks like an ominous calculus problem. The tension in baseball comes in spurts between long waits where everyone can forget about it, a perfectly lifelike rhythm.

— Baseball

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

— Baseball

Nearly everyone's son wants to be a baseball player. Why not? What other profession could he choose where he can slide around in the dirt, never work when it rains and spit whenever he wants?

— Baseball

You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too.

— Baseball

The baseball mania has run its course. It has no future as a professional endeavor.

— Baseball

I am having a plaque put on the front of my house. It will say, "To God, Mother, Father and Baseball."

— Baseball

Then there’s Jackie Mitchell. In 1931, while signed to the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Southern Association’s Double-A league, she pitched in an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. First batter she faced and struck out? Babe Ruth. The second? Lou Gehrig. Not too shabby for a one-pitch wonder who had a nasty 12-6 curveball and great control.

— Baseball

Toni Stone played second base for a lot of years, beginning with a semi-pro men’s team when she was just 15, and wound up in the Negro Leagues, where a female ball player in the 30s was no more welcome than her black male counterparts were in MLB.

— Baseball

When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.

— Baseball

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

— Baseball

Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only time we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.

— Baseball

You know what baseball is? It's playing cards, sleeping, watching TV. Dress. Batting practice. Fool around with the fans. Joke with teammates. Football is a little different. Before the game, everybody sits on the floor, quietly, thinking whose head they're going to take off.

— Baseball

Speed alone doesn't count, while strength alone isn't of much value. You've got to use your head. The team with the noodle is the one that invariably wins in the long run. The theme of baseball is much like that of prize fighting. Speed and strength must be mixed thoroughly with brains.

— Baseball

Of any tradition outside of our Constitution, that is our tradition, baseball.

— Baseball

Baseball has an inner beauty. It is not governed by time. [...] Baseball, in crucial moments, is often a contact sport, with men on the bases. But if you sit back and just look, you're seeing the most orderly and the most classic game, I believe, in the world. This is why you cannot photograph it. You cannot put it on television and make it as exciting as the other sports. It's too big a range and you have the flattening out on the screen. You lose all the kinetic energy.

— Baseball

Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You "take in" a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.

— Baseball

Bo would come out to the baseball games and yell at me. He'd yell, "You're a sissy. You're a big sissy. You're hitting a ball that can't hit back. Come out and hit a man that can hit you back."

— Baseball

I have never known a day when I didn't learn something new about this game.

— Baseball

Why, certainly I'd like to have a fellow who hits a home run every time at bat, who strikes out every opposing batter when he's pitching and who is always thinking about two innings ahead. The only trouble is to get him to put down his cup of beer, come down out of the stands, and do those things.

— Baseball

Now, don't get me wrong. I like baseball. I played it when I was growing up — my hero was Roberto Clemente. But you have to be a die-hard fan for baseball. What are there — 162 games in baseball? (My wife once asked me: "When does the season start? When does it end?") I just can't keep interested over the long haul. I really don't get interested until it reaches the playoffs and the World Series.

— Baseball

Baseball is...watching your husband sing "Happy Birthday" to 's mule.

— Baseball

If you build it, he will come.

— Baseball

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

— Baseball

He told me he couldn't wait for the basketball season to end, so he could go back to baseball and get out of shape.

— Baseball

It was as a sociologist, not as a sportsman—I cannot endure the boredom of sport—that I seized the opportunity to witness for the first time a game of baseball. I found that it has the great advantage over cricket of being over sooner.

— Baseball

Baseball is not pressure. Pressure is when you're 7 years old and you don't have food to eat. I used to cry a lot, inside. So when you've come from nowhere and have all that I have now, I sleep like a baby every night.

— Baseball

Baseball is the American success story. It is the only avenue of escape for thousands of boys born into a dreary 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.

— Baseball

The game of baseball is like the game of life. You're up one day, down the next. You have a bad day, so what? It's the same as being married and having a family. You expect your family to stay healthy, but if a child comes down with the measles, you're not through with children. We're down right now, but we'll be back.

— Baseball

I would say I wouldn't know, but I would say the reason why they'd want it passed is to keep baseball going as the highest baseball sport that has gone into baseball, and from the baseball angle. I'm not going to speak of any other sport. I'm not in here to argue about other sports; I'm in the baseball business. It's been run cleaner than any baseball business that was ever put out in a hundred years at the present time.

— Baseball

I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."

— Baseball

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.

— Baseball

Good pitching always stops good hitting, and vice versa.

— Baseball

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

— Baseball

This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings..

— Baseball

Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand.

— Baseball

In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball …\xa0Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms … the game of ball is glorious.

— Baseball

I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative.

— Baseball

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

— Baseball

Baseball is too much a business to be a sport and too much a sport to be a business.

— Baseball