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

When we played, World Series checks meant something. Now all they do is screw up your taxes. – Don Drysdale, 1978

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

They are supposed to be dispassionate dispensers of Pure Justice, icy islands of emotionless calculation. In short, umpires should be acute Republicans. – George F. Will, 1990