Quotations about Baseball
The game of Base-Ball, now very generally practiced, is one of the very best of
The birds are singing happily,
The sun is shining warm,
The teams are playing snappily,
And getting into form.
~"Romeo" Brooks, "Spring Fever," Baltimore and Ohio Magazine, April 1922 [Spring training!
The genius of our institutions is democratic;
He may not score, and yet he helps to Win
Who makes the Hit that brings the Runner in.
~Arthur Guiterman, "Of Sport," A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
The man who halted on third base to congratulate himself failed to make a home run. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, George Horace Lorimer, editor, as reprinted in Poor Richard Jr's Almanack, 1906
Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror. ~George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997, georgecarlin.com
A baseball game is twice as much fun if you're seeing it on the company's time. ~William Feather, The Business of Life, 1949
Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off... the right pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases. ~Rick Maksian
Cricket is a splendid game, for Britons. It is a genteel game, a conventional game — and our cousins across the Atlantic are nothing if not conventional. They play Cricket because it accords with the traditions of their country so to do; because it is easy and does not overtax their energy or their thought. They play it because they like it and it is the proper thing to do. Their sires, and grandsires, and great-grandsires played Cricket — why not they? They play Cricket because it is their National Game, and every Briton is a Patriot. They play it persistently — and they play it well. I have played Cricket and like it. There are some features about that game which I admire more than I do some things about
But Cricket would never do for Americans; it is too slow... but two hours of
Our British Cricketer, having finished his day's labor at noon, may don his negligee shirt, his white trousers, his gorgeous hosiery and his canvas shoes, and sally forth to the field of sport, with his sweetheart on one arm and his Cricket bat under the other, knowing that he may engage in his national pastime without soiling his linen or neglecting his lady. He may play Cricket, drink afternoon tea, flirt, gossip, smoke, take a whiskey-and-soda at the customary hour, and have a jolly, conventional good time, don't you know?
Not so the American Ball Player... He may be the Swellest Swell of the Smart Set in Swelldom; but when he dons his
UMPIRE. A guessing machine used and abused in and about a baseball game. ~Noah Lott (George V. Hobart), The Silly Syclopedia, 1905
You can have the nine greatest individual ball players in the world, but if they don't play together the club won't be worth a dime.
A good cigar is like a beautiful chick with a great body who also knows the American League box scores. ~M*A*S*H, "Bug-Out," 1976, written by James Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum
October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football. ~Jason Love, jasonlove.com
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. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. ~A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977
The woods smell like spring. I know it's too early, but I've reinstalled the Phillies baseball icon on the home page of my phone. ~David J. Beard (1947–2016), @Raqhun, tweet, January 2010