B a s e b a l l

Ø "You see, 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." (Jim Bouton from Ball Four) Ø "If you can do it, it ain't braggin." (Dizzy Dean)

Ø "I once came up in the bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, and we're down by a run. Then I look over in the opposing dugout and they're all in street clothes." (Bob Uecker)

Ø "This is some kind of game, isn't it?" (Pete Rose to Carlton Fisk in the tenth inning of game 6 of the 1975 World Series)

Ø Marilyn Monroe to Joe Dimaggio on her reception by US troops in Korea: "It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering." Joe: "Yes I have."

Ø Dennis Eckersly in the Inside Sports issue of 3/89: "You just live and learn. And hopefully you learn quick enough."

Ø "Tomahawk, Schmomahawk." (banner at 1993 Phillies playoff game against the Braves)

Ø "As serious baseball fans know, baseball trivia is an oxymoron, nothing in baseball is trivial ." (George Will)

Ø "Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher I've ever seen. He always pitches on the day the other team doesn't score any runs." (Tim McCarver)

Ø "The first time I faced him, I watched him take that easy windup. And then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him... every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park." (Ty Cobb on facing Walter Johnson)

Ø "Your Holiness, I'm Joseph Medwick. I, too, used to be a Cardinal." (Former St. Louis outfielder Joe "Ducky" Medwick, as part of a group of World War II servicemen granted an audience with the pope.)

Ø When asked asked who he preferred to play in the 1980 World Series, George Brett replied, "The Cubs." The Cubbies were a bad team that year and as such not one that George would get to face.

Ø "Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?" (The old man in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea)

Ø A professor of English at the University of Rochester, George Grella, has written that "while (baseball) radiates a spiritual transcendence, it also expresses a parallel paradoxical quality of sadness . . . it instructs us in two crucial American concepts, the loneliness of space and the sadness of time." (Time essay by Lance Morrow)

Ø "As someone who has spent a few years of my life on the disabled list, I can tell you that what Cal has done and is still doing is beyond my comprehension. . . He's still a dangerous hitter, still the most reliable shortstop out there, and he is the essence of class on and off the field. He's enough to make you sick." (Paul Molitor on Cal Ripken)

Ø "I faced him when he could throw it through the car wash without getting it wet." (paraphrased, Pete Rose on Nolan Ryan)

Ø Ty Cobb, on why he felt he could only hit .300 against modern pitching: "You've got to remember I'm 73."