Quotes About Baseball

You grow up dreaming about playing in the World Series since you're a little kid. I remember the days in the back yard with my parents playing whiffle ball, saying, 'Hey, it's Game 7 of the World Series, are you gonna win or are you gonna lose?'

If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never see it again.

You know, when I was a young boy I used to play baseball in my back yard or in the street with my brothers or the neighborhood kids. We used broken bats and plastic golf balls and played for hours and hours.

I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.

Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.

The typical baseball play is a pitcher throwing a ball and the batter not swinging at it, while the other players watch. Even a home run, the sport's defining big blast, is only metaphorically exciting; a fly ball that leaves the yard changes the score but may offer no more compelling view than an outfielder staring up.

My dad used to do it when we were little, and I tried it when we played around in the back yard. Eventually, I got a bat and a real ball and played around to see if I could hit left-handed.

You're playing a game, whether it's Little League or Game 7 of the Word Series. It's impossible to do well unless you're having a good time. People talk about pressure. Yeah, there's pressure. But I just look at it as fun.

Bunting is usually a waste of time. The - generally, yeah, I mean, if you think about it, bunt is the only play in baseball that both sides applaud. The - if the home team bunts, you get a base. The home team applauds because they get an out, and the other team applauds because they get a base. So what does that tell you?

I think it's particularly stupid that filmmakers have traditionally said, 'Yeah, I like baseball, but the movie's not going to be about the intricacies of the game.' I mean, you wouldn't cast an overweight guy with stubble if you were doing a ballet film.

Baseball player. Yeah, that was my dream before acting, or alongside acting.

Yeah, I miss it. You don't just break off a friendship you've had with a sport, and with all those you've met all over the country. We've got some friends, some very close friends, and you just sit back and think how fortunate you were having a career like that. And, actually, there's nothing in the game of baseball that hasn't happened to me.

My whole life, baseball was my first love. I was gonna go play college, but during my senior year I tore my ACL, and college kind of faded away with their offer, which I understand, obviously. That was a dark time in my life.

I hated baseball. I really didn't like baseball at all until someone decided they were going to pay me... Every year I played in the big leagues, the day the season ended, I called my buddies in West Virginia and said, 'I'll be home tomorrow.'

My first year in the big leagues, I made $17,000. It was easy to go out and get another $17,000 relief pitcher. I never worried about innings or pitches. I just pitched.

My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn't pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn... If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year's time.

If a guy hits .300 every year, what does he have to look forward to? I always tried to stay around .190, with three or four RBI. And I tried to get them all in September. That way I always had something to talk about during the winter.

Jamie Moyer was in his third year as a major league pitcher and was, by his own admission, still wide-eyed, watching everything going on around him and soaking it in. He paid particular attention to older teammates on his Chicago Cubs squad, hoping to emulate habits that had allowed those veterans to extend their careers.

I was the worst hitter ever. I never even broke a bat until last year when I was backing out of the garage.

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.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

On radio, you're in your own little world. Every time I'd be doing a possible no-hitter - I think I've done something like 25 no-hitters and a couple of perfect games - I would always put the date on the tape. Not for me, but for the player, so that 25 or 30 years later when he's playing it for his kids or grandkids, you have that date.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.