Baseball quotations

Page 3

◆ A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

- Jim Bouton99

◆ Players like rules. If they didn't have any rules, they wouldn't have anything to break.

- Coach Lee Walls99

◆ They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But I have found that the ones who drink milkshakes don't win many ball games.

- Casey Stengel99

◆ (Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action

- John Irving99

◆ Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

- Philip Roth99

◆ The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.

- Michael Lewis99

◆ Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.

- Jerry Spinelli99

◆ He has the body of a professional athlete, chiseled to perfection in all the right places.

- Collette West99

◆ I like watching baseball as much as my grandma's left ear is loud. (She'd probably give her right ear for a left ear that wasn't soundproof). ?

- Jarod Kintz99

◆ Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game!

- Babe Ruth99

◆ But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

- Chad Harbach99

◆ If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself!

- Mickey Mantle99

◆ It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day.

- Michael Chabon99

◆ If you don't think too good, don't think too much.

- Ted Williams99

◆ We picked the Red Sox because they lose. If you root for something that loses for 86 years, you're a pretty good fan. You don't have to win everything to be a fan of something.

- Jimmy Fallon99