Quotes About Baseball

I think you come to watch baseball, and if you're a true fan, then you enjoy watching baseball. MLB tries to change this and change that, speed up the games, but baseball's baseball. You can't change it. It's America's pastime. It's the greatest game on earth. I don't really want to change it that much.

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.

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

I heard that in the United States the level of baseball was the highest in the world. So it was only natural that I would want to go there, as a baseball player.

I chose baseball because to me baseball is the best game of all.

I was a very good baseball player and football player as a kid, but my father always told me - occasionally while striking me - that I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. And I think there's great truth in that.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

Baseball as I have said before to many... many parents it's not about wins and losses. It's about the life lessons that are learned on that baseball field. The perseverance, the hard work that it takes, dealing with failure.

I never argue with people who say baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn't. And that's what makes it great.

We used to have an all-Black baseball team, all Black stars and when White folks took Jackie Robinson and brought him into the major league that was the beginning of the crushing of Black baseball teams and leagues.

I don't like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game,but it isn't exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.

If you can't enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.

The best thing you can do in the whole world is to play baseball. That's a lucky job... The passion for baseball is always going to be there.

Major league baseball is about the history of the game. Baseball history is so important. It's so much more than money.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

Until my senior year, baseball and basketball were my best sports; and even when I was a senior, I still wanted to play baseball professionally. But the family wanted me to go to college and I guess I agreed with them or else I would have accepted some of the offers I got.

Baseball will miss Steinbrenner. He did a lot of great things-and some not so great-but it's a sad day for baseball, no doubt about it. He was a winner, and he made the Yankees a winner.

(Al) Lopez is a great believer in speed and hustle, in the go-go style of baseball. No other manager is so determined a foe of stodgy baseball, lack of hustle and slipshod practices and so powerful an advocate of the unexpected.

Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.

I grew up with baseball; I played in Little League and went to games with my dad. But I, as I grew up, became more of a basketball fanatic than a baseball one.

For every man with a baseball story - a memory of a moment at the plate or in the field - there is a woman with a couldn't-play-baseball story.

Basically I am a low-culture person. I prefer watching baseball with a beer and some meatballs.

If I walked back into the booth in the year 2025, I don't think it would have changed much. I think baseball would be played and managed pretty much the same as it is today. It's a great survivor.

There are several insights at the heart of the A’s system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it’s a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god’s sake don’t go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out.

They say I couldn't play football, I was too small. They say I couldn't play basketball, I wasn't tall. They say I couldn't play baseball at all and now everyday of my life, I ball.

I never gave up as a player, and I won't give up as someone who wants to go to the Hall of Fame, because it's the ultimate goal for a baseball player or a football player or a basketball player.

A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.

When I was a little-leaguer, I was sort of famous for stealing bases - and it started only because my mom wanted to be sure where I was in the afternoons. Mom always used to say, "If you don't come home dirty, you didn't play a baseball game." So I always tried to get in a situation where I had to slide so that I could go home dirty.

Tennis was always there for me, which was lucky. I would go play baseball, basketball, football, hang with my brother, do whatever, and at the end of the day I'd come back and say, 'Hey, Mom, would you hit 15 minutes worth of balls with me?'

If I had to choose between baseball’s Hall of Fame and first class citizenship for all of my people. I would say first-class citizenship.

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

I've got a wife, four kids, a business, and a baseball career.

Baseball is sunshine, green grass, fathers and sons, our rural past.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it's called the free market. That's how most people's salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.

I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn't pick me to play baseball.

I do have a family, and obviously I spend as much time as I can with them. Though even when I'm with my family, my mind tends to drift toward baseball.

I have a relationship with Christ. It allows me to handle situations better. It allows me to treat people better and it allows me to have a better mental attitude towards baseball.

If I couldn't broadcast baseball games, I think I would make a good impression on people.

I played softball for a few years growing up. Both my brothers played baseball.

I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards.

Courage is the virtue that President Kennedy most admired. He sought out those people who had demonstrated in some way, whether it was on a battlefield or a baseball diamond, in a speech or fighting for a cause, that they had courage that they would stand up, that they could be counted on.

Baseball, like some other sports, poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big, selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think of displaying.

Opening day. All you have to do is say the words and you feel the shutters thrown wide, the room air out, the light pour in. In baseball, no other day is so pure with possibility. No scores yet, no losses, no blame or disappointment. No hangover, at least until the game's over.

Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.

If I had been busted for drugs instead of gambling, I'd still be managing the Reds and baseball would be paying for my rehab.

Every life lesson is on that baseball field.