Diamond Quotes

“The only thing now lacking to forever establish base-ball as our national sport is a more liberal encouragement of the amateur element. Professional baseball may have its ups and downs according as its directors may be wise or contrary, but the foundation upon which it all is built, its hold upon the future, is in the amateur enthusiasm for the game. The professional game must always be confined to the larger towns, but every hamlet may have its amateur team, and let us see to it that their games are encouraged.”

john montgomery ward

“The only reason baseball is our national sport, instead of cricket or soccer, is that practically all American males play baseball or its equivalent—stickball on the city streets, softball on the school yards—when they are young. When they grow up they go watch the games, not so much to enjoy the thrill of appreciation that anybody must feel seeing Phil Rizzuto scoop up a grounder and get rid of the ball in one fluid motion, but more because the spectacle restores their youth, warms them with nostalgic memories of the fun they had as kids.”

red smith

“Maybe a scientific game of ball is worthy of the high esteem in which it seems to be held by numerous fans, but to a man of untrained perception it is about as interesting as to watch a mathematician work out a problem in differential equations on a blackboard.”

new york times

“It is a grand game, even if it could be a lot better, even if its use of statistics is foggy and its management occasionally dumb, even if the sports writers and the broadcasters tell us little about it that they have not repeated a thousand times. It is still a grand game because it exemplifies strategy in the raw, and because it has an air of mystery about it.”

vannevar bush

“Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.”

john updike

“In playing or managing, the game of ball is only fun for me when I’m out in front and winning. I don’t care a bag of peanuts for the rest of the game.”

john mcgraw

“All plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.”

john rawls

“In my heart, I never called one wrong.”

bill klem