American Baseball Quotes & Sayings

At the high school level, the coaches get these kids in revenue-driven sports and take them away from baseball. There's so much pressure on these kids to even play spring football. We need to get the African-American players back in the game, which I think would make it not only a better game, but more exciting and entertaining for everyone. — Pat Gillick

I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond. — Jim Jarmusch

In the field of outdoor sports, the American boy is easily capable of devising his own amusements, and until some proof is adduced that baseball is not his invention, I protest against this systematic effort to rob him of his dues. — John Montgomery Ward

It's no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony. — Nathan Hill

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

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility. — Albert Goodwill Spalding

They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth. — George Mikes

What I'd really like to give a try is cricket, because I grew up playing American baseball. — Jeremy London

Baseball is the greatest of American games. Some say football, but it is my firm belief, and it shall always be, that baseball has no superior. — Thomas A. Edison

Two hours is about as long as any American can wait for the close of a baseball game, or anything else for that matter. — Al Spalding

Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion. — Ernie Harwell

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community. — George Will

Basketball is a game. Baseball is a religion. Baseball is American. — Jerry Reinsdorf

Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing ... The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness. — Joyce Carol Oates

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth. — David Halberstam

It baseball is an American institution and more lasting than some marriages, war, Supreme Court decisions and even major depressions — Art Rust Jr.

Bruce Sutter and his new pitch, the split finger fastball, fascinate the manager of the Cuban national teams. 'We must find out about this new weapon,' he said. 'Are the American hitters plotting to murder him? — Thomas Boswell

Do right-handed people live longer than lefties?

Then again, there are some things about lefties that can't be explained so easily. For whatever reason, whether it's the pressures of living in a world designed for righties, or all the talk of having shorter life spans, lefties have higher rates of depression, drug abuse, allergies, and schizophrenia. But lefties also have an advantage in sports like fencing, tennis and baseball, not to mention greater academic success and higher IQs. Five of America's last eleven presidents were lefties, even though they make up only 10 percent of the American population." (I believe Obama is a leftie as well, making that 6 of the last 12 presidents). — Anahad O'Connor

As I watched him, he turned it curiously, then pressed a button on the side of the case. The crystal kitty head popped up to reveal a hidden compact mirror.
"I think it's you," I chirped.
Ben wheeled around and smiled approvingly. "I like it. Very Japanese."
"Thank you," I said. "I also got something for you."
"I'm not wearing a wig."
"You're such a downer." I handed him a baseball cap, then took off my camera case and slung it around his neck. "There: Generic American Tourist. No one will look twice at you."
"I'll choose not to take that as an insult. — Hilary Duff

The NFL has a hard cap, but if you ask 20 NFL experts who is going to win the Super Bowl this year, you might get 20 different answers. If you then asked 20 baseball experts who is going to represent the American League in the World Series, at least 90 percent of them would say the Yankees and the rest would say Seattle. — Bob DuPuy

Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time. — Donald Hays

In August of 1921, one of the great American combinations was unveiled - even better than the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This fortuitous new blend was radio and baseball. — George Vecsey

You know that everyone thinks that in order to do South Park we must be wild, crazy, rock and roll stars. But the truth is we're just wholesome middle-American guys. We enjoy soda pop, baseball and beating up old people just as much as anybody. — Trey Parker

The game is just, everybody talks about baseball, but I really think football probably has a little bit more American feeling than anything. — Joe Montana

I love baseball. And American Football, too. But not rugby. — Carlos Slim

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials. — Evan Bayh

In the two weeks following the All-Star Game, baseball was largely upstaged by the events of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal, including Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci's seven perfect 10.0 scores, Bruce Jenner's record-setting decathlon triumph, and the five gold medals won by U.S. boxers Howard Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Leonard, Leo Randolph, and brothers Leon and Michael Spinks - the mightiest performance of any American boxing team in Olympic history. — Dan Epstein

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. — Walt Whitman

Check out my interview with Kostya Kennedy on themodern online. Sports Illustrated writer and author of Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. It may change your mind, one way or the other. — Kostya Kennedy

You have to remember that baseball really was the American pastime in the Forties, not football, basketball or any other sport. — Harrison Ford

And of course in America you've got American football and baseball and all those other ball games, soccer has become a little niche that the women have kind of filled. — Parminder Nagra

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. — Wynton Marsalis

Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution. — Herbert Hoover

Baseball and American football and hockey are all ahead because they have a history. The MLS is kind of new. So hopefully, in time, and with players coming and trying to develop the game, and the U.S. team also doing well - at the last World Cup, they finished above England and created some buzz. — Thierry Henry

Last year was the fourth or fifth attempt to get fall launched till 'American Idol' comes in January. To be honest, the reality programming we had on last year was considered filler until we could get to the good stuff. It was meant to hopefully get us to January andor to November. To get past baseball. But (it) didn't work very well. — Mike Darnell

Every day I went to the ballpark in Yankee Stadium as well as on the road people were on my back. The last six years in the American League were mental hell for me. I was drained of all my desire to play baseball. — Roger Maris

Statistics are the lifeblood of baseball. In no other sport are so many available and studied so assiduously by participants and fans. Much of the game's appeal, as a conversation piece, lies in the opportunity the fan gets to back up opinions and arguments with convincing figures, and it is entirely possible that more American boys have mastered long division by dealing with batting averages than in any other way. — Leonard Koppett

I'm always telling people baseball needs to be more prominent in the African American community. What a better way to do so, going on these TV shows and appearing on the cover of this or that. Now kids can see how baseball can change your life. Frank Thomas did that for me. — Matt Kemp

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.. — Willem De Kooning

I think the worst one [indian mascot] is the Cleveland Indians' Big Chief Wahoo. It's just a red face on a baseball with a big, toothy grin. It's the Sambo of all other offensive mascots. I have never seen a Native American smile that hard before, not even at a casino opening. — Wanda Sykes

If you're an American reader, you can love short stories the way other Americans love baseball; this is our game, people! We have more than two hundred years of know-how and knack, of creativity. — Amy Bloom

As American as an apple is and as American as baseball is, they don't go together. You can't be chewing an apple at a baseball game. You've got to let go of the diet that day. — Kevin James

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

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into. — Jonathan Frakes

American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability - the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action - that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project. — Robert Coover

I was a good college kid, all-American and baseball-playing, living in the dorms with a million barbarians. I did not expect to be claimed by Fitzgerald hook, line, and sinker. 'This Side of Paradise' - that sweet, sophomoric pastiche of notes, scenes, poetry, and plays - I felt like he'd written the book just for me. — Ron Carlson

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager. — Ernest Hemingway,

A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story. — Thomas Boswell

I don't do stuff to be a star. I do it because I feel it's important for kids, African American kids, to see an African American face that plays baseball. — Matt Kemp

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

Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. — Ted Williams

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season
these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said? — George Will

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim. — John Cheever

Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life's work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart. — Kenesaw Mountain Landis

When I took the job as the manager of the Olympic team, I didn't take it because I was a Dodger. I did it because I was an American, and I wanted to bring that gold medal where it belongs in baseball, the United States. And that's exactly what our team did. — Tommy Lasorda

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.
But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock. — Franklin Foer

May the sun never set on American baseball. — Harry S. Truman

I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American: the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution. — Pete Hamill

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it. — Chad Harbach

I've been watching American baseball on television for a long time, but it was only in recent years that, realistically, I've been thinking about playing here. — Hideki Matsui

Baseball is continuous, like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons. — Donald Hall

In and of itself, sports may be trivial, but as a symbol of the American way of life, it has enormous weight. We are seen, worldwide, as an enormously competitive, enthusiastic people who work as hard as we play and play as hard as we work. When baseball - which has traditionally canceled one day of games for huge national celebrations or disasters - stops play for six days, that has reverberations in the national consciousness. — Thomas Boswell

Major League Baseball is a national institution and we take our responsibilities seriously when it comes to how the game affects the lives of American youth. — Bud Selig

I've seen the growth of this game in this country, the stadiums that were built, the great European players that have come and the great American players who've been created. Americans want to be number one at everything. And they are at baseball, football, basketball. Soccer is growing fast, and I want to be a part of that. — David Beckham

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it's so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it. — Gore Vidal

I also knew that I was on my way to becoming the worst athlete in the history of American boyhood. — Frank Rich