Quotes About Baseball

America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers.

I don't like to sound egotistical, but every time I stepped up to the plate with a bat in my hands, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the pitcher.

He (Jackie Robinson) was the greatest competitor I've ever seen. I've seen him beat a team with his bat, his ball, his glove, his feet and, in a game in Chicago one time, with his mouth.

My father gave me a bat for Christmas. The first time I tried to play with it, it flew away.

I'm aware of the luck in [BABIP], but at the same time, you can't directly influence it. You can just keep mixing your patterns, executing and locating, That's the human element of this game.

What, and give him (the batter) a chance to think on my time.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

I want to be the best leadoff hitter of our time.

Occasionally Rebecca wished her son would not be so very kind to her, as though she was the losing pitcher on a Little League team.

On grieving: I broke my days into separate moments. See, it's true, I didn't have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on TV.

There was no telling who would win. It would definitely be close. But she knew which side she was pulling for. Go Red Sox.

There's a duty and an obligation to community that we must teach our children to honor no matter how far they go. Life is like baseball: You only score when you leave home and return home.

When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd waste my life and be a poet. They were right.

Baseball is a lot like life. The line drives are caught, the squibbles go for base hits. It's an unfair game.

Because I have so much life on my pitches, I can get away with getting too much of the plate every now and then.

I've had heroes in my life - Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth.

I think back and I really feel for what he (Roger Maris) went through, for all the negative stuff that was going on in his life. I wish it didn't happen.

Si dejaba de creer podía venirme abajo, perder el ritmo, regalar bases a los bateadores. Joder, sí, tenía dudas, pero las reprimía. Ya era bastante dura la vida de un pitcher para que encima tuviera que perder la fe en Dios.

You see," Bouton wrote, "you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." Truer words were never written.

The term in baseball nowadays is a "walk-off home run." It didn't exist until Kirk Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Dennis Eckersley in game one of the 1988 World Series and Eckersley referred to it as "a walk-off," meaning, quite simply, that when someone does what Gibson did to him in that game, there's nothing left to do except walk off the mound into the dugout and then into the clubhouse.

Fifteen minutes in the majors means you're a great baseball player," said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland—who never got his fifteen minutes above the Triple-A level. "People just can't understand how good you have to be to get there at all.

Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base — in both senses — greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.

To Replogle, the players were victims. The owners poured out a stream of pious, pompous verbiage about how pure they were. The gamblers said nothing, kept themselves hidden, protected themselves —and when they said anything, it was strictly for cash, with immunity, no less. But the ballplayers didn't even know enough to call a lawyer. They only knew how to play baseball.

A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can, and does, devour any set of diamond statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more.