Baseball quotes.pdf - Baseball Excellence

"Why does sour cream have an expiration date?" - Larry Anderson
"How do you know if you run out of invisible ink?" - Larry Anderson
"I sent Kruk one of those fruit and nut baskets at the hospital. I don't know if he
likes fruit, but I know he'll appreciate the nuts." - Larry Anderson, on John Kruk,
after John Kruk had surgery
"Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in
design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man’s hand. Pick it up and it instantly
suggests its purpose: it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance—thrown
hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport’s critical
dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams
heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different.
Hold a baseball in your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it
across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle
finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and
sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it.
The game has begun." — Roger Angell, in Five Seasons
"The press box at Wrigley Field in Chicago is an extended narrow shed, two rows
deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park’s
second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber
down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion
and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered,
circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate.
Seen from this vantage point, the preoccupied fans below sometimes suggest a
huddled, uncomplaining horde of immigrants stuffed into steerage on some
endless voyage toward better luck—not an inappropriate image if we remind
ourselves that this famous rustbucket, the good ship Cubbie, last dropped
anchor in the shining harbor of the World Series in 1945 ..." - Roger Angell, in
Fortuity
"This is a linear sport. Something happens and then something else happens,
and then the next man comes up and digs in at the plate. Here’s the pitch, and
here, after a pause, is the next. There’s time to write it down in your scorecard or
notebook, and then perhaps to look about and reflect on what’s starting to
happen out there now. It’s not much like the swirl and blur of hockey and
basketball, or the highway crashes of the NFL.
Baseball is the writer’s game, and its train of thought, we come to sense, is a
shuttle, carrying us constantly forward to the next pitch or inning, or the sudden
double into the left-field corner, but we keep hold of the other half of our ticket,
for the return trip on the same line. We anticipate happily, and, coming home,