Baseball Quotes - Page 54

We used to have an all-Black baseball team, all Black stars and when White folks took Jackie Robinson and brought him into the major league that was the beginning of the crushing of Black baseball teams and leagues.

The baseball held was my fantasy of what life offered.

He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as baseball itself. And he made us believe that. He changed our minds and suddenly, all of America wanted to dance just like Gene Kelly.

As long as I've got one chance to beat you I'm going to take it.

I'd rather not throw the ball at all.

I was the worst hitter ever. I never even broke a bat until last year when I was backing out of the garage.

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

There is still nothing in life as constant and as changing at the same time as an afternoon at a ballpark.

If you gave me a choice between being married and being a baseball player, that's a no-brainer. I would be married any day. I just love it.

Like a lot of people who get into coaching, I was impacted by the people in my life. Certainly my father (John) who coached me in youth league baseball, and my high school coach, Joe Moore, were mentors and major influences.

I wanted to play baseball!

All the courage and competitiveness of Jackie Robinson affects me to this day. If I patterned my life after anyone it was him, not because he was the first black baseball player in the majors but because he was a hero.

John Henry Lloyd is the man I gave the credit to for polishing my skills. He taught me how to play third base and how to protect myself. John taught me more baseball than anyone else.

Owners, the way they blackballed me from baseball, the way they used me, in a sense, and then the way they wanted to send a signal to the other players, saying, you know, we're going to get Jose Canseco out of the game. This is a cue or a message for you other guys to stop using steroids because the owners lost total control of the steroid use.

I was a professional athlete, the best baseball player in the world at one point.

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

I'm a football guy. Baseball, I enjoy it at playoff time.

When you win you eat better, sleep better and your beer tastes better. And your wife looks like Gina Lollobrigida.

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

You think the greatest thing in the whole world would be to become a baseball player - if best things already happened, what's next?

Definitely if you're an athlete, you're gonna be having all the baseball fame you can have. That's the great thing about baseball and sports. You can measure ability.

Though I like the various forms of football in the world, I don't think they begin to compare with these two great Anglo-Saxon ball games for sophisticated elegance and symbolism. Baseball and cricket are beautiful and highly stylized medieval war substitutes, chess made flesh, a mixture of proud chivalry and base - in both senses - greed. With football we are back to the monotonous clashing armor of the brontosaurus.