BASEBALL QUOTES IV

quotations about baseball

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


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"


My idea of managing is giving the ball to Tom Seaver and sitting down and watching him work.

SPARKY ANDERSON

attributed, Late Innings


Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.

JOE GARAGIOLA

Baseball Is a Funny Game


Am I still in uniform? Then I ain't retired.

PETE ROSE

St. Petersburg Times, Mar. 23, 1989


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


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


One of the great things about baseball is that it can be played almost anywhere.

JOSH LEVENTHAL

Baseball Yesterday & Today


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


Learning to hit a baseball is like learning a foreign language. If you want to speak a foreign language without an accent, you have to do it when you're young. After a certain age, it's too late.

JOHN RITTER

The Boy Who Saved Baseball


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 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


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


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


The state of baseball is the barometric pressure of America's soul.

VICTOR ALEXANDER BALTOV

JR., Baseball Is America


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


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


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


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