It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in 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. – A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazi

Ideally, the umpire should combine the integrity of a Supreme Court judge, the physical agility of an acrobat, the endurance of Job and the imperturbability of Buddha. – "The Villains in Blue," Time magazine, 25 August 1961

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, Ball Four, 1970

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up. – Sharon Olds, This Sporting Life, 1987