Baseball Quotes

Worrying about things you can't control is a waste both on the baseball field and in life.

~ Tom Swyers

Four out of five doctors prescribe baseball for whatever ails you. The fifth guy is a quack.

~ Tom Swyers

Indeed, the maligned American pastime of baseball may be by-far the greatest and best sport by one criterion, when it comes to emulating and training for genuinely useful Neolithic skills! Think about it. The game consists of lots of patient waiting and watching (stalking), throwing with incredible accuracy and speed, sprinting, dodging... and hitting moving objects real hard with clubs! And arguing. Hey, what else could you possibly need? Now, tell me, how do soccer or basketball prepare you to survive in the wild, hm?

~ David Brin

He speaks in that strange sports talk, telling me about the start of the new season and asks if I follow baseball. No. I really don’t. He assures me if I stay in town long enough I will become a baseball fan. It’s a requirement of living in St. Louis. Everyone is a Cardinal’s fan. “Loyal,” he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.

~ Gwenn Wright

They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.

~ Yuri Herrera

Practice hard,Train hard,work hard and Play harder.

~ Alcurtis Turner

DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.

~ David Halberstam

It is unlikely that we will hit a home run anytime soon but if we are unable to get rid of offensive sports team nicknames, we will strike out.

~ Adam Dodek

Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.

~ Roger Kahn

Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life.

~ Charles R. Sledge Jr.

If mankind was playing a baseball game, he would still be choosing his lineup after the game was over.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Baseball was a safe bet. Baseball also didn't have a girlfriend. Then again, baseball didn't have big brown eyes or show a little hint of cleavage under its uniforms. Decisions, decisions.

~ Rachel Spangler

Real ballplayers pass the stuffing by rolling it up in a ball and batting it across the table with a turkey leg.

~ Tom Swyers

That's what happens when you're thirty-seven years old: you do the things you always did but the result is somehow different.

~ Michael Lewis

Deep down, it's all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with.

~ Vernon D. Burns

ESPN, is having the ability to foretell future outcomes in sports.

~ Anthony Liccione

As history of any kind will tell us, when human beings get an opportunity to express their individual selves, a few selves will go completely over the top.

~ Doug Glanville

You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

~ Roger Kahn

And it started out fun. We were chattering enthusiastically, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. But as the evening wore on, and the numbers rolled in, it got quieter, and I found myself becoming intensely depressed. Why was I putting myself through this? The issues I’ve devoted my life to have become so marginalized by the coverage that they have no possible relevance to me. I can’t even blame the media — people simply don’t care about alternate-party politics. And why should they? I’m so far in the minority that my activism is a joke, a punchline that stopped being funny years ago. It goes beyond rooting for the underdog. It’s not rooting for the Giants: it’s more like, say, rooting for the Twins. But during the Super Bowl.

~ Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

It ain't over 'til it's over.

~ Yogi Berra

[On writing:] There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing t

~ David Halberstam

It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.

~ Hank Aaron

(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it, it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

~ John Irving

I've never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eyesight, yes.

~ Leo Durocher

I've fallen in love with baseball.

~ Nick Jonas

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I'd never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.

~ Stuart Dybek

I see great things in baseball.

~ Walt Whitman

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.

~ Sinclair Lewis

That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century--the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.

~ Don Delillo

For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. In the winter, the talk was of trades, predictions, memories. During the season, it was always the most recent game. They were both Mets fans, and the hopelessness of that passion had created a bond between them.

~ Paul Auster

Only one person can own any plate at a time. It belongs to the pitcher, or it belongs to the batter, Aiken, but not to both. You understand.

~ Allan Dare Pearce

One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but when you let the game flow organically and allow yourself to be fully present. You'll often hear scouts say of a great prospect, The game comes slow to him. It mean the prospect is skilled and poised enough to let the game unfold in its own time, paying no attention to the angst or urgency or doubt, funnelling all awareness to the athletic task at hand.

~ R.a. Dickey

You didn't play baseball that well with two hands. How do you think you're going to make it with one? If you're just going to tell me what I can't do, you can leave.

~ Mary Jane Auch

The reporter asked, why did you play so hard.Because there might have been somebody in the stands today who'd never seen my play before, and might never see me again-Joe DiMaggio

~ Joe Dimaggio

Baseball, of all sports, and maybe of all human endeavors, has no room for cynicism.

~ Howard Frank Mosher

On the surface, there is something peculiar about turning a portion of one's happiness over to a collection of ballplayers, and perhaps more peculiar still is concerning oneself about ball games played decades before one's birth.

~ Tom Swift

Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.

~ Michael Lewis

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

~ Michael Lewis

Italian-Americans in New York had not been in much of a flag-waving mood prior to DiMaggio's arrival. By the All-Star break, the rookie had established himself as a wonderful player (.358, 10HR, 60 RBIs), fully justifying the acclaim. But Gehrig was even better (.399, 20 HR, 61 RBIs). He was leading the league in nearly every category, including invisibility.

~ Jonathan Eig

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

~ Thomas Boswell