There are surprisingly few real students of the game in baseball; partly because everybody, my eighty-three year old grandmother included, thinks they learned all there was to know about it at puberty. Baseball is very beguiling that way.
Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.
Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.
Baseball is an island of activity amidst a sea of statistics.
The greatest feeling in the world is to win a major league game. The second-greatest feeling is to lose a major league game.
What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!… Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils…. Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.
They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans.
Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.
Well, boys, it’s a round ball and a round bat and you got to hit the ball square.