Baseball Trivia Quotes & Sayings

Joe Sewell is the toughest strikeout in baseball history. In 14 seasons he struck out only 114 times - he never struck out three times in a game, and he struck out twice in a game on only two occasions. So how is it possible that a 30-year-old pitcher who won eight games and recorded 54 strikeouts - in his career - fanned Sewell twice in one game? I don't know, but he did, in 1923. — Tucker Elliot

The Indians franchise is more than a century old. It's been called the Blues, the Bronchos, and the Naps. It's also been called a lot worse during hard times when the team wasn't winning. — Tucker Elliot

The best word to describe Albert Belle during the mid-1990s is "prolific." The man could flat hit. — Tucker Elliot

And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I don't have to be making something to feel like life has value. — Kelly Reichardt

Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial. — George Will

World Series MVP is a unique individual honor because with one exception - Bobby Richardson won 1960 World Series MVP honors for the Yankees, but the Pittsburgh Pirates won the Series that year - by virtue of winning the award you guarantee your teammates have won a ring. — Tucker Elliot

I almost gasp: he's said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law. — Margaret Atwood

Pretty people aren't as accepted as other people. It's like, 'She's pretty and thin and she's got to have problems. She's messed up.' — Mischa Barton

To make your Opinion Count,
you have to do something more
than just making Money. — Vineet Raj Kapoor

Baseball is known for superstitious players and cursed teams - and at the root of every curse there's a story. Boston's curse was to trade Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Cubs fans claim a billy goat is responsible for their futility. And Cleveland's curse? The club struggled after its Pennant-winning 1954 season, but it was rich with optimism just two years later as an onslaught of new talent promised to lift the club once more to the ranks of baseball's elite - and by 1959 the club was contending for the Pennant again. And then GM Frank Lane traded Rocky Colavito to the Detroit Tigers and cursed everything. — Tucker Elliot

Free agency changed the baseball landscape in many ways. It created more opportunities for players, but it also meant increasingly fewer players would spend an entire career playing for one franchise - and that's especially true for players capable of becoming "legends," the ones in such demand on the free agent market. — Tucker Elliot

Just as America has grown and prospered within the framework of our Constitution, so Christianity has flourished and spread according to the laws set forth in the Bible. — Billy Graham

It was like the baseball gods were showing off just for him, in honor of his first day of big league baseball. And surely the baseball gods were smiling that day, because the next batter was Larry Brown, and he was a scrawny, scrappy 23-year-old kid who'd never hit a big league home run. And yet he stepped to the plate and became just the second player in baseball history to connect and give his team four consecutive home runs. — Tucker Elliot

It's one thing to win a game with a base hit, or to save a game by pitching a scoreless ninth ... it's something altogether different to save our National Pastime by day in and day out showing up with the joy and passion of a kid playing Little League and the determined attitude and work ethic of a consummate professional bent on doing one thing and one thing only: his job. — Tucker Elliot

General manager Frank Lane made his mark on the club by making several unpopular or unsuccessful trades. Among the guys he traded to other teams are Rocky Colavito, Roger Maris, Norm Cash, and ... manager Joe Gordon? Uh, yes. Lane and Detroit GM Bill DeWitt traded managers - Joe Gordon for Jimmy Dykes. Lane's tenure ended shortly thereafter, long before the damage he caused. — Tucker Elliot

If what I feel for you is dislike -- for coming between me and my work sometime every day in the last fifteen months --if that's dislike...If being unable to forget your voice, or the way you turn your neck, or the lights in your hair -- if that's dislike...If wanting to hear that you're married and dreading to hear that you're married...If resenting the condescension that pretends you're not out of my reach...Perhaps you can identify these symptoms for me. — Winston Graham

Joe DiMaggio batted safely in 56 consecutive games in 1941, the same season Ted Williams batted .406 - but did you know that also in 1941, Jeff Heath, an outfielder who spent a decade playing for the Indians, became the first player in AL history to hit 20 doubles, 20 triples, and 20 home runs in the same season? It's true. — Tucker Elliot

Vic Wertz once hit a ball rather famously that was later described as such: 'It would have been a home run in any other park - including Yellowstone.' Instead, he's remembered as the guy who got robbed by Willie Mays' spectacular catch during the 1954 World Series between the Indians and the Giants, a play that remains one of the game's all-time greatest defensive efforts. What people often forget about Wertz is that his greatest battle wasn't that one at bat, and that one out never defined his career. He was stricken with polio in 1955, and after 74 games his season was over and his career was hanging in the balance. 'The Catch' by Willie Mays couldn't keep him down, and neither could polio - he came back in 1956, and despite playing in only 136 games he belted 32 home runs with 106 RBIs. — Tucker Elliot

It's always a thrilling experience to go into a place that offers you a lot of choice. You know it's like it reminds you of when you're a kid and you go to the amusement park and whether it be Disneyworld or Six Flags you know that thrilling moment when you first enter and you know you've got all these possibilities for the day and it's really a ... it's a wonderful feeling. — Sheena Iyengar

And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions? — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

I'd wanted emotion but couldn't find it here, so I settled for motion. — Anderson Cooper

Sometimes are feats aren't so fabulous, they're just dubious - but either way, they're fun to talk about. — Tucker Elliot

I don't know how long we talked about that game the first time my dad showed me the ticket stub. He admitted he hadn't even been sure that he still had it, that he was surprised when he'd been able to find it. But we've spent hours and hours and hours talking about it since. And it's pretty amazing, because that ticket stub sat in a box for two decades - once it let my dad into a stadium to see a baseball game, and then later, it let me into my dad's world, into his past, to learn about the man who taught me to love a game so passionately that it shaped nearly every aspect of my life. — Tucker Elliot