Quotes from Thomas Boswell

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

There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

When you fall in love with golf, you seldom fall easy. It?s obsession at first sight.

Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.

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

The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too.

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

Familiarity, and a few dozen cheap flyballs off the Monster, breed contempt.

What most people want to keep under wraps (from reporters) is trivial: petty jealousies, professional feuds, etc. By contrast, most of the things they have thought about most seriously all their lives they are perfectly winning to uncover.

Almost without exception, they are men who dreamed of athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent.

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?

The naked pinch hitter takes only one thing to the plate: his raw, and somewhat irrational, confidence in himself. That this confidence is so unreasonable adds to its dignity.

Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

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.

All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.