Sports Quotes

"The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love." - - Bryant Gumbel

"Don't pick on your sister when she's holding a baseball bat." - - Joel, 10 Advice from Kids

"The hardest thing to do in sport is to hit a round baseball with a round bat, squarely." -- Ted Williams

"I'm beginning to see Brooks [Robinson] in my sleep. If I dropped a paper plate, he'd pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first." - - Sparky Anderson

"It's designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone." - - A Bartlett Giamatti, Comissioner of Baseball, 1989.

"Baseball reflected the language of America, and spiced it, too. Presidents, politicians, executives, generals and parents touched all the bases regularly so that nobody would be out in left field or caught off the base in the greater pursuits of life. If you did it right, you hit a grand slam home run; if not you struck out." - Joseph Durso

"Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is." - Bob Feller

"I exploit the greed of all hitters." - - Lew Burdette

"Let them think I throw it. That gives me an edge because it is another pitch they have to worry about." - - Lew Burdette, on throwing the spitball

"They were starting to hit the dry side of the ball." - - Lew Burdette, on when he knew it was time to retire

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring." Rogers Hornsby, Hall of Famer

"Hello again, everybody. It's a bee-yooo-tiful day for baseball." - - Harry Caray

"One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something." - Nolan Ryan

"I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit to keep playing baseball." - Pete Rose

"When you're in a slump, It's almost as if you look out at the field and it's one big glove." - Vance Law

"The game has a cleanness. If you do a good job, the numbers say so. You don't have to ask anyone or play politics. You don't have to wait for the reviews." - Sandy Koufax

"Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction." - - Robert Frost

"We're supposed to be perfect our first day on the job and then show constant improvement." - - Ed Vargo, major league baseball umpire

"Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical." - - Yogi Berra

"Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalised for too many players on the field." - - Jim Bouton

"All I want out of life, is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.'" - - Ted Williams

"A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz." - - Humphrey Bogart

"Baseball is dull only to dull minds." - - Red Barber, announcer

"He's been very talkative. But it is usually under oath." - - Sandy Alderson on Albert Belle

"If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I'd trip her. Oh, I'd pick her up and brush her off and say, 'Sorry Mom, but nobody beats me." -- Leo Durocher

"Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster." - - Joe Adcock

"When we played softball, I'd steal 2nd base, feel guilty and go back."
--Woody Allen

"He's such a big, strong guy he should love that porch. He's got power enough to hit home runs in any park, including Yellowstone." - - Sparky Anderson on Willie Stargell batting in Tiger Stadium in the 1971 All Star game.

"That's why I don't talk. Because I talk too much." - - Joaquin Andujar

"There's one word that describes baseball -- 'You never know.'" - - Joaquin Andujar

"I was thinking of making a comeback until I pulled a muscle - vacuuming."
-- Johnny Bench, on how he felt about Charlton Fisk breaking his record for career home runs by a catcher.

"A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." - - Jim Bouton, NY Yankees

"The players are too serious. They don't have any fun any more. They come to camp with a financial adviser and they read the stock market page before the sports pages. They concern themselves with statistics rather than simply playing the game and enjoying it for what it is." - Rocky Bridges, from The Sporting News, December 12, 1970

"It's a good thing I stayed in Cincinnati for four years -- It took me that long to learn how to spell it." - - Rocky Bridges

"You know when you've got it made? When you get your name in the crossword puzzles." - - Rocky Bridges

"On Jose Gonzalez changing his name to Jose Uribe: 'He was definitely the player to be named later.'" - - Rocky Bridges

"This is a tough park for a hitter when the air conditioning is blowing in."
--Bob Boone on the Astrodome in Houston

"For five years in the minor leagues, I wore the same underwear and still hit .250, so no, I don't believe in that stuff." - Dusty Baker, on superstitions

"There'll be two buses leaving the hotel for the park tomorrow. The two o'clock bus will be for those of you who need a little extra work. The empty bus will leave at five o'clock." - - David Bristol, Milwaukee Brewers manager

"That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on the ball." -Bill Veeck, 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

"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

"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you." - Roy Campanella

"A baseball club is part of the chemistry of the city. A game isn't just an athletic contest. It's a picnic, a kind of town meeting." - Michael Burke

"Trying to hit him (Phil Niekro) was like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks."
--Bobby Murcer, Yankees outfielder

"Why certainly I'd like to have that fellow who hits a home run every time at bat, who strikes out every opposing batter when he's pitching, who throws strikes to any base or the plate when he's playing outfield and who's always thinking about two innings ahead just what he'll do to baffle the other team. Any manager would want a guy like that playing for him. The only trouble is to get him to put down his cup of beer and come down out of the stands and do those things." - - Various