Take me out to the ball game! These 9 memorable quotes from great baseball books will remind you why you love America’s national pastime.
1. From The Summer Game by Roger Angell:
“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.”
2. From Moneyball by Michael Lewis:
“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
3. From Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella:
“Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple.”
4. From Ball Four by Jim Bouton:
“He just ran into Doubleday’s First Law, which states that if you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.”
5. From Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam:
“Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.”
6. From Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin:
“Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys, I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports.”
7. From Summerland by Michael Chabon:
“The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
8. From Made To Break Your Heart by Richard Fellinger:
“I knew hard times lay ahead, but after a while, as I broke a slight sweat in the afternoon sun while enjoying the sound of a ball smacking leather, things seemed just a little better, if only for those few moments.”
9. From A Great and Glorious Game by A. Bartlett Giamatti:
“It 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.”
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