Some of my favorite quotes are listed here. Click the sub-page links at the bottom for more fascinating readings.
Baseball is life. The rest is just details.
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
~ Dave Barry
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.
~ George F. Will
People will come Ray...For reasons they can't even fathom. They'll walk out to the bleachers and sit in their shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. It will be just like when they were children and cheered their heroes, and they'll watch the game, and it will be as if they were dipped in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces. This field, this game, it's part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
~ W.P. Kinsella Field of Dreams
It ain’t over til it’s over.
~ Yogi Berra
It's not a game of inches, like you hear people say. It's a game of hundredths of inches. Any time you have a bat only that big around, and a ball that small, traveling at such tremendous rates of speed, an inch is way too large a margin for error.
~ Rube Bressler
(My addition to the above quote: this is from the batter's point of view, but the same could be said of the fielders' perspectives. The ball that just barely brushes leather and then clears the wall for a home run; the one that kicks up the barest bit of chalk to be called fair; and of course, the one that the umpire calls as "STEEE-RIKE THREE" to end the game when it was obvious to 40,000 hopefuls that it was clearly ball four. Yes....an inch is way to much to measure by.)
There's no crying in baseball!
~ "A Game of Their Own"
Fans don't boo nobodies.
~ Reggie "Mr. October" Jackson
A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz.
~ Humphrey Bogart
Let's play two today!
~ Mr. Cub
A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.
~Earl Wilson
I knew it was going to be a long season when, on opening day during the national anthem, one of my players turns to me and says "Every time I hear that song, I have a bad game."
~ Jim Leyland
Good pitching will beat good hitting any time, and vice versa.
~Bob Veale
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
~A. Bartlett Giamatti
You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.
~Earl Weaver
I have discovered in twenty years of moving around a ball park, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.
~Bill Veeck
You know it's summertime at Candlestick* when the fog rolls in, the wind kicks up, and you see the center fielder slicing open a caribou to survive the ninth inning.
~Bob Sarlette * or AT&T or PacBell or......
I daydream just like everybody else, I just do it with my body facing the field, so everybody thinks I'm paying attention.
~ Greg Maddux
Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.
~Ted Williams
It was a cross between a screwball and a change-up -- a screw up.
~ Cubs reliever Bob Patterson, on one that was hit out of the park
We're supposed to be perfect our first day on the job and then show constant improvement.
~ Ed Vargo, major league baseball umpire
Not really a quote, but a great sign seen at a Phillies game:
"IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, USE STAIRS"
(context: at the time, age 40+ Matt Stairs [yes, the former Cub], was their prime pinch-hitter)
"Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player."
~ Anonymous
I can never understand why anybody leaves the game early to beat the traffic. The purpose of baseball is to keep you from caring if you beat the traffic.
~ Bill Vaughan, columnist
“A pitcher needs two pitches – one they’re looking for and one to cross them up.” — Hall of Famer and Braves great Warren Spahn
For more quotes, go to: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quomenu.shtml
or http://www.quotegarden.com/baseball.html
Also, click on these buttons to see other pages with more baseball writings.