Baseball

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. – Ted Williams

A good cigar is like a beautiful chick with a great body who also knows the American League box scores. – M*A*S*H, Klinger, “Bug-Out,” 1976

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. – Paul Gallico

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings. – Earl Wilson

Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up. – Bob Lemon

Baseball is a fun game. It beats working for a living. – Phil Linz

Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror. – George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997

Back then, my idol was Bugs Bunny, because I saw a cartoon of him playing ball — you know, the one where he plays every position himself with nobody else on the field but him? Now that I think of it, Bugs is still my idol. You have to love a ballplayer like that. – Nomar Garciaparra

Nolan Ryan is pitching much better now that he has his curve ball straightened out. – Joe Garagiola

Watching a spring training game is as exciting as watching a tree form its annual ring. – Jerry Izenberg

Trying to sneak a pitch past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster. – Attributed to both Joe Adcock and Curt Simmons

Pro-rated at 500 at-bats a year that means that for two years out of the fourteen I played, I never even touched the ball. – Norm Cash, on his 1,081 strikeouts

During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. – Mickey Mantle, 1970

I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice. – Casey Stengel, 1967

The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays. – Lawrence Ritter

Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. – Steve Busby, in Washington Post, 8 July 1974

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. – Thomas Boswell, in Inside Sports

My dad taught me to switch-hit. He and my grandfather, who was left-handed, pitched to me everyday after school in the back yard. I batted lefty against my dad and righty against my granddad. – Mickey Mantle

Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player. – Author Unknown

One of the chief duties of the fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him. This department of the game has been allowed to run down fearfully. – Robert Benchley