Another Baseball Season

Sunday, April 8, 2012 – Another Baseball Season

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. ~ Rogers Hornsby

I don’t want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it. ~ Rogers Hornsby

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. ~Ted Williams

I’m convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile. ~ Tom Clark

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. ~ Paul Gallico

When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back. ~ Woody Allen

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base. ~ Dave Barry

There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem – once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. ~ Al Gallagher

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings. ~ Earl Wilson

The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays. ~ Lawrence Ritter

Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror. ~ George Carlin

Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. ~ Bob Lemon

What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game…. There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife’s fidelity and his mother’s respectability. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I see great things in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. ~Walt Whitman

Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. ~ Steve Busby

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in 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. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. ~ Pete Hamill

Watching a spring training game is as exciting as watching a tree form its annual ring. ~Jerry Izenberg

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

There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine. ~ Pat Conroy

Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical. ~ Yogi Berra

Baseball is a harbor, a seclusion from failure that really matters, a playful utopia in which virtuosity can be savored to the third decimal place of a batting average. ~ Mark Kramer

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. ~ Thomas Boswell

Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand. ~ Leo Durocher

Why does everybody stand up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” when they’re already there? ~ Larry Anderson

Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It’s the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot. ~ Dick Gregory

Cricket is basically baseball on valium. ~ Robin Williams

If it weren’t for baseball, many kids wouldn’t know what a millionaire looked like. ~ Phyllis Diller

I watch a lot of baseball on the radio. ~ Gerald R. Ford

I always get very calm with baseball. ~ Paul Simon

I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn’t play ball too good – I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn’t preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing. ~ Muddy Waters

I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world. ~ Bill Lee

The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons. ~ Michael Lewis

Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past. ~ Albert Theodore Powers

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

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

Baseball is the most intellectual game because most of the action goes on in your head. ~ Henry Kissinger

A hot dog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz. ~ Humphrey Bogart

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become. ~ Mary McGrory