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Baseball Sports Quotes

This collection of (serious) quotes is from baseball. Baseball seems like a sport just waiting to be quoted about. There are plenty of baseball quotes around that are funny, but these are chosen to educate, motivate and make you ponder. Enjoy.



"Today I am the greatest of all time."
- Ricky Henderson on May 1, 1991, after he eclipsed Lou Brock's stolen base record of 938. He held the base over his head as he proclaimed this to the crowd

You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time. 
- Jim Bouton, Ball Four, 1970

My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.
- Hank Aaron

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

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

There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all.
- Lou Gehrig

Set your goals high, and don't stop till you get there.
- Bo Jackson

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

baseball big hit baseball big hit

Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem. 
- Saul Steinberg

It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. 
- A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

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

Life will always throw you curves, just keep fouling them off ... the right pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases. 
- Rick Maksian
I see great things in baseball.  It's our game - the American game.  It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism.  Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set.  Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. 
- Walt Whitman

The other sports are just sports.  Baseball is a love.
- Bryant Gumbel, 1981
There have been only two geniuses in the world.  Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. 
- Tallulah Bankhead.

A game of great charm in the adoption of mathematical measurements to the timing of human movements, the exactitudes and adjustments of physical ability to hazardous chance.  The speed of the legs, the dexterity of the body, the grace of the swing, the elusiveness of the slide - these are the features that make Americans everywhere forget the last syllable of a man's last name or the pigmentation of his skin. 
- Branch Rickey, May 1960

Baseball is reassuring.  It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
- Sharon Olds, This Sporting Life, 1987

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

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

Baseball, it is said, is only a game.  True.  And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. 
- George F. Will, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, 1990
Baseball?  It's just a game - as simple as a ball and a bat.  Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes.  It's a sport, business - and sometimes even religion.
- Ernie Harwell, "The Game for All America," 1955



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