As Major League Baseball resumes a few days early this season, a few familiar and obscure comments about the National Pastime might be a nice warm-up on a chilly Spring – and a respite from controversies. From ex-ballplayers Jim Bouton and Bob Uecker to scholar/executive Bart Giamatti and historian Jacques Barzun to Abbott & Costello and Zane Grey, baseball quotes aren’t uncommon, but here are a few gems:
Gail Mazur: “Baseball holds so much of the past, pulls me back to it each year, to the soothing unclocked unrolling of the innings, to the sound of an announcer through an open car, the sweet attenuations of late summer afternoons. The sound of cleats on an asphalt drive, a bat cracking a ball, delirious cheers call out to surprise me in easy conversation with strangers in spring.”
Stanley Cohen: “Baseball, almost alone among our sports, traffics unashamedly and gloriously in nostalgia, for only baseball understands time and treats it with respect. The history of other sports seems to begin anew with each generation, but baseball, that wondrous myth of twentieth century America, gets passed on like an inheritance.
Bill Veeck: “Destiny has become less manageable, and consequently life has become …. more difficult. Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very un-orderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”
Bob Feller: “Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is.”
Buck O’Neil: “A guy [can] hit the ball out of the ballpark, or a home run to win a game, and that same guy can come up tomorrow in that situation and miss the ball and lose the ball game. It can bring you up here but don’t get too damn cocky because tomorrow it can bring you down there. You know there always will be a tomorrow.”
Tom Wicker: “The game has changed, but it’s not fundamentally different. All the old symmetry is there – the innings and outs in their orderly multiples of threes, the foul lines radiating out to the stands, the diamond in its classic dimensions Astroturf, designated hitters, Disneyland scoreboards, and Batting Glove Day can’t change all that.”
Stan Musial: “Baseball, perhaps preeminent among American institutions, fulfills this simple truth: The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Roger Angell: “Within the ballpark, time moves differently, marked by no clock, the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball — why this sport, for all the enormous changes it has undergone remains somehow rustic. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
Thomas Wolfe: “One reason I have always loved baseball so much is that it has been not merely ‘the great national game,’ but a part of our lives, of the thing that is our own, the million memories of America. Almost everything I know about spring is in it — the first leaf, the maple tree, the grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than the smell of the wooden bleachers in a small town baseball park, that resinous, sultry and exciting smell of old dry wood.”
Tristram Potter Coffin: “Sportswriters argue about whether baseball is the national game or not. It doesn’t matter. The father shoving a glove and bat into the crib of his first son is a cliché simply because it symbolizes something typical about American hopes and fears.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin: “If I close my eyes against the sun, all at once I am back at Ebbets Field, a young girl in the presence of my father, watching players of my youth on the grassy field below. There is magic in this moment, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond between our three generations, an anchor of loyalty linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never saw but whose person they have already come to know through this most timeless of all sports, the game of baseball.”
Donald Hall: “My father and I played catch as I grew up. Like so much else between fathers and sons, playing catch was tender and tense at the same time. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and games the Iroquois played. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death. The diamond encloses what we are.”
Stan Isaacs: “I don’t love baseball. I don’t love most of today’s players. I don’t love the owners. I do love, however, the baseball that is in the heads of baseball fans. I love the dreams of glory of 10 year olds, the reminiscences of 70 year olds. The greatest baseball arena is in our heads.”
Finally, the late novelist Robert B. Parker: “Baseball is the most important thing in life that doesn’t matter.”
Contact Bill at: bill.knight@hotmail.com