Baseball Field Quotes & Sayings

I'd never even been to Wrigley Field. I never even enjoyed baseball that much, but I loved being there, the crowd was lovely, and they all sang with me! — Bea Arthur

So, a crash course for the amnesiac," Leo said, in a helpful tone that made Jason think this was not going to be helpful. "We go to the 'Wilderness School'" - Leo made air quotes with his fingers. "Which means we're 'bad kids.' Your family, or the court, or whoever, decided you were too much trouble, so they shipped you off to this lovely prison - sorry, 'boarding school' - in Armpit, Nevada, where you learn valuable nature skills like running ten miles a day through the cacti and weaving daisies into hats! And for a special treat we go on 'educational' field trips with Coach Hedge, who keeps order with a baseball bat. — Rick Riordan

Even though my dad was a manager in the minor leagues, I still traveled around with him and saw it from the field out. Now, as an owner, you're kind of looking from the whole baseball activity from outside in, from a fan's perspective. — Cal Ripken Jr.

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. — Mariah Nelson

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

I found a sense of peace on Beechnut. I could just walk with him and not have to say a word. In between takes, I would sit with the cast and Beechnut would stand behind me, sometimes with his head on my shoulder. I didn't have to tie him, up; he would just stand there. I loved being a cowboy ... again. The only other times
I'd felt this sense of peace had been while fielding ground balls or playing catch on a baseball field or doing stand-up when everything was working. When filming was over, my agent, Andrea Eastman, gave me Beechnut as a surprise gift. at first, I didn't want him. Owning a horse is an enormous responsibility, and
I was concerned hat my relationship with him was just a location romance. But I accepted, and I rode him until 2009, when he passed away at the age of twenty-eight. — Billy Crystal

I played [baseball] in college, so it wasn't that much a stretch. But I would say the main thing for guys who hadn't played before it's just one word - swagger. If you have swagger on the field, and look like you know how to play, that's 90% of it. — Tyler Hoechlin

There is nothing like Ruth ever existed in this game of baseball. I remember we were playing the White Sox in Boston in 1919, and he hit a home run off Lefty Williams over the left-field fence in the ninth inning and won the game. It was majestic. It soared. — Waite Hoyt

I would like people not to think in terms of the 755 home runs I hit but think in terms of what I've accomplished off the field and some of the things I stood for. — Hank Aaron

The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well. — Roger Clemens

I just loved officiating, and I hope what I did helped make it better. That's what I tell young umpires: you can have fun. I never spent a day where going out on a baseball field didn't make me feel better. — Doug Harvey

The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars' worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody's attention. "Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field." "So don't tell people there's terrorism? That's your solution?" said Brooklyn. "How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?" Arturo said. "This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin' popcorn. — James Patterson

To be a star and stay a star, I think you've got to have a certain air of arrogance about you, a cockiness, a swagger on the field that says, "I can do this and you can't stop me." I know that I play baseball with this air of arrogance, but I think it's lacking in a lot of guys who could have the potential to be stars. — Joe Morgan

The positive psychology field has taught us about the benefits of optimism and happiness. One study correlated the life spans of Major League Baseball players with their smiles. In 2010, researchers Ernest Abel and Michael Kruger analyzed 230 baseball cards from 1952, a time when cards featured athletes looking straight at the camera. The results will make you want to smile.
* Players not smiling had an average life span of 72.9 years.
* Players partially smiling had an average life span of 75.0 years.
* Players with a full smile had an average life span of 79.9 years. — Jim Afremow

If you could equate the amount of time and effort put in mentally and physically into succeeding on the baseball field and measured it by the dirt on your uniform, mine would have been black. — Mike Schmidt

God what an outfield,' he says. 'What a left field.' He looks up at me, and I look down at him. 'This must be heaven,' he says.
No. It's Iowa,' I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girl-child in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass small that seems locked in the air like permanent incense; and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoelss Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit.
I think you're right, Joe,' I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration. — W.P. Kinsella

[A] baseball field was the only place where he felt he was exactly where he was born to be. — Sara Pennypacker

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game — Edward Abbey

When I was real young I wanted to play baseball. I really loved playing center field, but that was never anything I was really ever that good at. I played up until I was in ninth grade. — Ryan Sypek

Aw, everybody knows that game, the day I hit the homer off ole Charlie Root there in Wrigley Field, the day October first, the third game of that thirty-two World Series. But right now I want to settle all arguments. I didn't exactly point to any spot, like the flagpole. Anyway, I didn't mean to, I just sorta waved at the whole fence, but that was foolish enough. All I wanted to do was give that thing a ride ... outta the park ... anywhere. — Babe Ruth

Football's a war game without fatal casualties; baseball is a picnic on a huge field, without the food. — Richard Corliss

No matter what I do on the baseball field, no matter how hard I try to be a good player, no matter how hard I try to be a good father or a good husband, I can never do enough. I can never be perfect in this world. But God's there to tell me that it's not what you do, it's whom you believe in and it's Him loving me. — Mark Teixeira

Jim Fregosi will be deeply missed in the baseball world. Joni and the rest of the family are in our prayers. Fregos, was the best manager I've ever played for. Our relationship was so special.and he was the one that taught me how to be a leader. Fregos and I could relate to each other whether we were in the clubhouse or on the field. In 1993 The City of Brotherly Love changed the world..Fregos was the driving force!!! — Darren Daulton

In East Bangor, Pennsylvania (population 800), there's a little diner named for the trolley that used to take people to the once-bustling steel town of Bethlehem. The proprietors have adorned the walls with photographs of other local things that are no more. There's one of the East Bangor band, a group of about twenty men and boys, in uniform, in front of a bandstand draped with bunting. There's also one of the Kaysers, a local baseball club, on the day of an exhibition ballgame against the Philadelphia Athletics. These were Connie Mack's A's, which team in those early 1930s featured Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove. How did a village of under a thousand people manage to have its own band? How did a cluster of slate-belt villages field a regular baseball club, apparently good enough to stay on the same field for nine innings with the Philadelphia Athletics? What — Anthony M. Esolen

There is a double-standard between men and women. My father was a major league baseball player, and I grew up thinking I could have the same attitude on the field that he did. When I did that in real life, people thought I was a total bi-atch. — Katie Uhlaender

If gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over-or undervalued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living. — Michael Lewis

In investing, just as in baseball, to put runs on the scoreboard, one must watch the playing field, not the scoreboard. — Warren Buffett

I had a basketball net that my dad had put up outside. I went out there and dribbled all day long. I wanted to play basketball. Then I'd go baseball, and then I'd go to football. I remember playing football in a plowed field. I grew up going from one thing to the next wanting to play something. — Joe Gibbs

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn't know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow. — John Updike

I'd rather be a good person off the field than a good baseball player on the field. — Bryce Harper

It is hard to ignore that is reality. But, at the same time, it still comes down to sound baseball decisions, farm systems and then execution on the field by the players. There are a lot of components to that (other) than just saying it is the highest salary. — Alex Rodriguez

People identify with the swashbuckling individuals, not polite little men who field their position well. Sir Galahad had a big following - but I'll bet Lancelot had more. — Bill Veeck

When I get on the field, it's just going to be another game, You get out there and it's just baseball. — Eric Byrnes

I truly believe my job starts the minute I leave the baseball field. Going out and catching ground balls and hitting, that's a job, and that's what I've wanted to do ever since I was a kid. But when you think about leaving that field, that's when the job and the demands really start. In New York, Seattle, every city. The community, the media, business stuff. You have to stay on a narrow path. — Alex Rodriguez

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it. — Al Lopez

There was a baseball game on but it didn't look real. It was guys in uniforms playing games on a deep green field. They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn't in jail, watching them from a completely different world. — Walter Dean Myers

I'm seeing the ball well. I'm not trying for home runs. I'm trying to hit to right field more. When I do that, the home run comes. — Sammy Sosa

The first day of spring, the vernal equinox - the season of renewal when the earth sheds its winter cloak, flowers bloom, and the heart feels as though everything is once again imaginable. The smell of fresh-cut grass, shagging fly balls, and scraping mud from baseball cleats. A brief contemplation and tear for those gone from the field, their easy laugh and nimble sprint no longer gracing the game. — Galen Watson

It's off the leg and into the left field of Doug Rader. — Jerry Coleman

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

Different people, different backgrounds, different ideals ... We walk in different doors at the beginning of the day, and we walk out of different doors at the end of the day. But when it is time to go out on that field, we all go through the same door. — Scott Rolen

Boston fans - and New York fans are the same - it doesn't matter what you do outside of baseball, they don't forgive or forget that you play in pinstripes and they don't care about your interests off the field. — Bronson Arroyo

Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity - the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, 'Field of Dreams', the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it's a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches. — J.R. Moehringer

Baseball is a lot like the ivy-covered wall of Wrigley Field
it gives off a great appearance, but when you run into it, you discover the bricks underneath. At times, it seems that we're dealing with a group of men who aren't much different than others we've all run into over the years, except they wear neckties instead of robes and hoods. — Hank Aaron

I have lots of favorites movies. I say this only because it's a favorite movie because it's a sport I love. I'm a huge baseball fan. There are movies I like as much as this, but I sort of single this movie out because I'm a baseball nut, and that's 'Field of Dreams.' — Rick Santorum

His herding instinct is so strong that he confuses tractors on a baseball field for sheep. He was hospitalized twice. Once by a line drive and once for attacking a tractor tread. — Tom Hayden

I've stated before that my number one priority as the steward of the Dodgers is winning, and I believe that hiring Ned is a step in that direction. With his genuine passion for baseball, his intimate knowledge of all aspects of the game, and solid leadership skills, I am confident that Ned's experience will help the Dodgers put a winning team on the field, year-in and year-out. — Frank McCourt

I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I'd never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field. — Yogi Berra

By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. — Donald Hall

Beside her, she can feel each breath he draws. How is it possible to be so close to a person and still not know what you are to each other? With baseball, it's simple. There's no mystery to what happens on the field because everything has a label
full count, earned run, perfect game
and there's a certain amount of comfort in this terminology. There's no room for confusion and Ryan wishes now that everything could be so straightforward. But then Nick pulls her closer, and she rests her head on his chest, and nothing seems more important that this right here. — Jennifer E. Smith

I've felt some great feelings on the baseball field ... in front of 50,000 people and millions on TV ... but the feeling you get when you give a kid a chance, that is a hundred times greater than that feeling. — Cal Ripken Jr.

Baseball is the only sport that lets the managers and coaches go out onto the field and rant and rave — Durwood Merrill

If only the world were as simple as baseball in a cornfield." - 2004 guestbook entry, Field of Dreams movie site — Dwier Brown

What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game ... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability. — George Bernard Shaw

I spent twenty-two seasons playing professional baseball. Naturally, success in that field is measured by batting averages, number of home runs and RBIs, fielding averages, ERAs and other statistics. Fame, notoriety and the bright lights fade quickly. To me, true success in life would be to develop both physically and spiritually to our fullest and to endure to the end! — Harmon Killebrew

Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below - Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

That surprised me. Not that it wasn't a damn good game. We saw it again, in fact, after he took up with Kate. Not that either of them paid much attention to what was going on down on the field. That was actually the day I had to accept that things had gone too far between the two of them. Otherwise, she never could have taken his mind off baseball. — Rysa Walker

The best place to catch a baseball hit by (Mark) McGwire is definitely not within the confines of the playing field, or sometimes even the ballpark. Other players dial '1' for long distance. McGwire has to ask for an international operator. — Thomas Boswell

I wanted to be like Nolan Ryan. I didn't want to be like Pete Gray ... And I don't want kids to be like me because I have one hand. I want kids to be like Jim Abbott because he's a baseball pitcher at Michigan and he won the Big Ten Championship game, and not because I can field a bunt and throw to first. — Jim Abbott

In spring training prior to his 1995 rookie season, Chipper was already so confident in who he was as a player that he famously deadpanned to veteran slugger Fred McGriff, after the Crime Dog grounded into an inning-ending double play, these two words: "Rally killer." His confidence carried over to the field, just as it had since he began playing as a kid - he batted .265, and he led all rookies with 23 home runs, 87 runs, and 86 RBIs. Hideo Nomo was Rookie of the Year for the Dodgers, but Chipper and the Braves were World Champions. — Tucker Elliot

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. — Ted Williams

All I ask is that you bust your heiny on that field. — Casey Stengel

I played everything. I played lacrosse, baseball, hockey, soccer, track and field. I was a big believer that you played hockey in the winter and when the season was over you hung up your skates and you played something else. — Wayne Gretzky

Baseball was my refuge. When I came on the field, I did my job, and did the best I could and focused on that. Then I went home and I was miserable. That was pretty much my routine every day.? — Joey Votto

The key to hitting for high average is to relax, concentrate, and don't hit the fly ball to center field. — Stan Musial

When the ball was last seen crossing the roof of the stand in deep right field at 315 feet, we wonder whether new baseballs conversing together in the original package ever remark: "Join Ruth and see the world." — Heywood Broun

When you're in a slump, it's almost as if you look out at the field and it's one big glove. — Vance Law

Those companies that don't see the black and brown communities are missing, out of their closed eye, talent, which leads to money and growth. When baseball, football and basketball couldn't see the field, they missed talent and growth. The same is true in the tech industry. — Jesse Jackson

Baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh ... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. — Terrence Mann

We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls. — Jim Fowler

Baseball grew rapidly in favor; the field was ripe. America needed a live outdoor sport, and this game exactly suited the national temperament. It required all the manly qualities of activity, endurance, pluck, and skill peculiar to cricket, and was immeasurably superior to that game in exciting features. — John Montgomery Ward

The first pitch to Tucker Ashford is grounded into left field. No, wait a minute. It's ball one. Low and outside. — Jerry Coleman

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. — J.R. Moehringer

Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you. — Chad Harbach

The vast majority of people who watch baseball can properly call 95% of all plays that happen on the field. My job is to teach you how to call the other 5%. — Jim Evans

Catfish Hunter was a man among men. He was a genuine person. There was nothing phony about him. I learned a lot from him, both on and off the baseball field. — Vida Blue

I built a baseball field in the lower part of our property and I'm always working on that. I got a wheelbarrow, a pick and a shovel, and I started to build a baseball field during writers' strike. We have boys and girls come over and we have clinics in the spring. It's called The Strike because it's named for the writers' strike. — John C. McGinley

After a play in the field Casey would turn (to the players on the bench) and say 'What did he do wrong?' or 'You're better than that guy.' Either way, he'd keep them from getting stale. — Mickey Mantle

I went to school, but nobody really noticed me. I just came to school, didn't dress up or anything - just a ghost. I just worked out and went out to the field and went the baseball route. That's how I've always been my whole life. — Bryce Harper

Baseball is more than a game. It's like life played out on a field. — Juliana Hatfield

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk. — Stanley Fish

I don't know (if they were men or women running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads. — Yogi Berra

Ben: You're gonna get arrested.
Lindsey Meeks: You can't sell your tickets!
Ben: That's why you ran across the whole field? ... Wait, you've got to tell me - was it spongy? — Jimmy Fallon

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't? — Michael Lewis

It's very warm there, so we were outdoors all the time. The local people had programs for us year-round, where as kids we had the opportunity to play football, basketball, baseball, track and field - we just went from one sport to the next, year-round. — Rafer Johnson

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

We [ me and brother] wanted to win at things like basketball games or baseball games, but off the field we never felt like we had to compete with each other. — Bengie Molina

It was a terrible psychic blow ... Ebbets Field was replaced by a housing project. How could a father tell his son where Duke Snider used to hit one? Point out Apartment 5Q? — Joe Flaherty

In baseball you hit your home run over the right-field fence, the left-field fence, the center-field fence. Nobody cares. In golf everything has got to be right over second base. — Ken Harrelson

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. — James Earl Jones

That moment, when you first lay eyes on that field - The Monster, the triangle, the scoreboard, the light tower Big Mac bashed, the left-field grass where Ted (Williams) once roamed - it all defines to me why baseball is such a magical game — Jayson Stark

Betemit's positional flexibility is the same as yours: He can stand around and muse about the great philosophical debates of our day anywhere on the field. Catching and throwing the baseball is an entirely different question. — Baseball Prospectus

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

Baseball isn't just a game. It's life being played out on a field - a field of dreams - on diamonds of green, where players pursuing their dreams try to be the best they can be on the grandest stage of all - where men become boys and boys become men, all speaking one universal language without uttering a single word. — Tom Tatum

I spent a lot of hours on the baseball field doing whatever I could do to get better. — Evan Longoria

Jim Fregosi was not only one of the most respected men in baseball, he was a great man. He was a player's manager. He had that special gift as a manager that made you want to get to the field and play your ass off for him. Jim Fregosi was the reason that 1993 was one of the most exciting years in Philadelphia sports history. — Lenny Dykstra

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began, "whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled. — Michael Chabon

I love sports. I've played basketball, baseball, soccer, tennis, track and field growing up. — Michael B. Jordan

The French don't have a baseball team. And if they did, there'd only be a left field, and no one would be safe. — Robin Williams

But he's kind of ... extreme. Like he came to school one day painted head-to-toe red, and it wasn't even Spirit Week. He told some people that he was protesting racism and others he was protesting the consumption of meat. Junior year he wore a cape every day for an entire month, cracked a chalkboard in half with a desk, and stole all the dissecting frogs from the science wing and gave them a funeral before burying them in the baseball field. — Jennifer Niven