Baseball Error Quotes & Sayings

When a baseball player makes an error, it goes into the record and is published. How many of us could stand this sort of daily scrutiny? — Sydney J. Harris

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed _sometimes_, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer
you didn't work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace; insofar as they cared they were suckered-in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car, a furnace, a gun? Can you make that throw one hundred times out of a hundred? If it can't be a hundred, it had better be ninety-nine. — Chad Harbach

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

It's a base hit on the error by Roberts. — Jerry Coleman

If ever an error had "F" written on it, that grounder did. — Jerry Coleman

Molly stood up. You made an error! She felt like saying. A bad throw. So what? It's a baseball game. A game. Who really cares? A bad throw? In the great scheme of things? A bad throw? Of course she didn't say that. She understood that your own errors always feel tragic. — Mick Cochrane

Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment - ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay - and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins. — Roger Angell

In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work. — Jed S. Rakoff

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? — Chad Harbach

And in that moment he felt- for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel- how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the noise and variet of Something, Nothing always found a way in, seeped through the cracks and patches. Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won and even the best hitters were put out 70 percent of the time — Michael Chabon

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time. — Michael Chabon