I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.
I’d love to stay in baseball, but I won’t beg. I’d love to work with young umpires. I think I could teach them, help them develop. I can spot flaws, help them get over the hump. You’re striving for perfection every game, yet you never achieve it. If baseball wants me, I’m available.
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.
I’m among the first girls ever to play Little League baseball, and to my knowledge, the very first in western Illinois. It was 1976, and I was a nine-year-old tomboy whose older brothers had played.
When I was a kid, I have two dreams. I want to be a baseball player. Hometown, Hiroshima, has a Japanese baseball franchise team called Hiroshima Carps. You know, and then I want to be a sushi chef. I want to make own restaurant – sushi restaurant.
Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom’s apple pie.
Baseball is like driving, it’s the one who gets home safely that counts.
I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.
I was a very good baseball and football player, but my father always told me I was much more interested in how I looked playing baseball or football than in actually playing. There’s great truth in that.
I am through with baseball forever. I have my farm and my home and enough to take care of me, so why should I work and worry any longer?
Baseball and the players association have rules. If you stay within the rules – which say that you can play while you’re appealing – I don’t see what anyone would be in arms about.
You should have seen Willie Wells play shortstop: as good as Ozzie Smith and a better hitter. How I wish people could have seen Ray Dandridge play third base, as good as Brooks Robinson and Craig Nettles and all of those. He was bowlegged; a train might go through there, but not a baseball.
For me, baseball is more comparable to chess than it is to hockey.
Growing up, I looked up to major league baseball players, and now these young women have amazing, incredible women all across the board, from swimming to gymnastics to softball to basketball.
We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls.
Willie Mays was the best baseball player I ever saw. He could do anything.
I’ve had a good time here in baseball. I love baseball. That’s why I’m still around.
That’s your dream, to play professional baseball. When you get the opportunity like that, getting drafted – especially by Oakland, a California team, pretty close to home – it was tempting. At the time, I just didn’t think I was ready or mature enough mentally or physically to start pro ball.
I’d like to think a baseball picture is somewhere in my future.
I was born to play baseball.
I belong to an improv group, I play cello, I have these phases – fencing, tae kwon do, baseball, ice hockey, boogie boarding in the summer, snowboarding in the winter.
I talked to a few schools about playing football, but I had already pretty much made my mind up. I fell in love with baseball at a young age, and I knew that that’s what I wanted to do.
Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.
I think we have our sports within our own culture that are huge with baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Those are the sports in America that we grow up with and soccer isn’t really there yet.
I was a baseball player and a football player at Stanford, so I didn’t play a lot of golf in college. I really started playing a lot after I turned pro and I had some time in the off-season.
I am amused by cricket because it seems to take longer than baseball and I like that. It seems like a sport I could have made up it – it takes several days to play and everyone wears sweaters. I can’t confess to knowing what’s going on at all.
That’s what makes baseball the best. Nothing matters but winning.
It was the baseball fantasy of a lifetime – to be able to sit on the bench with all those professional athletes. I got to take my son along because I wasn’t sure I would be able to play with them.
Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You’ll be an old man before you know it.
I tried to get a baseball movie made a couple of years ago and I don’t think it didn’t happen because I was a woman, but because sports movie don’t sell internationally.
Young players need to know how to take care of themselves for life after baseball.
Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?
If you rush in and out of the clubhouse, you rush in and out of baseball.
Major league baseball has asked its players to stop tossing baseballs into the stands during games, because they say fans fight over them and they get hurt. In fact, the Florida Marlins said that’s why they never hit any home runs. It’s a safety issue.
Everyone thinks I’m this jock of a woman, but I didn’t play any sports. I didn’t even let my kids play baseball because I was afraid they were going to get hit by balls.
I come from a city like St. Louis, where they consider themselves great baseball fans.
Hockey is no longer a big four. It’s football, basketball, baseball and soccer. Now, I’m not talking MLS. I’m talking COPA, World Cup, men’s, women’s, MLS, youth… and there’s a lot of reasons for it.
In baseball, I was a pitcher, which I hated because there was no action there.
I have an older son, Josh, and growing up, he just didn’t care that much for baseball. And that was fine. But Chaddie, he always wanted to go to the ballpark. He just kind of took to it right away.
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.
In America, we have three major sports – baseball, football and basketball. They get the most coverage. Then there’s things like golf which mop up most of what is left. But track and field? We are way at the bottom of the totem pole.
Whether you want to or not, you do serve as a role model. People will always put more faith in baseball players than anyone else.
Baseball gets better for whatever reason.
In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.
Did I collect baseball cards? I’ve got 10 books full of plastic in my mother’s house. All the Upper Decks, the Fleers, the Fleer Ultras. My grandfather brought me to the trade shows. I collected Marvel cards, too.
In baseball, you can’t kill the clock. You’ve got to give the other man his chance. That’s why this is the greatest game.
In baseball, it doesn’t matter if you’re tall, skinny, fat, whatever. If you really have talent and you really love to play, I feel like you can make it.
I played baseball, and that’s pretty much it. Basketball came late, this was, basketball was the sport that I tried to master, I kind of mastered baseball, so basketball was one of those things where I wanted to master this game, so that’s why I probably play it the way I do.
There’s nothing like Opening Day. There’s nothing like the start of a new season. I started playing baseball when I was seven years old and quit playing when I was 40, so it’s kind of in my blood.
There are three things you can do in a baseball game. You can win, or you can lose, or it can rain.
Five days after the Tsarnaev brothers blew up Boston’s most sacred event, and just 24 hours after one brother was killed and the other was caught, everyone decided that it was OK to play baseball at Fenway again. The game happened on a Saturday afternoon, preceded by an emotional ceremony and many prayers.
I took a huge risk leaving baseball, because I was predicted to play in the big leagues. I’m kind of a prototypical second baseman.
I started skating and I kind of liked it because I could run circles around the guys that wouldn’t pick me to play baseball.
The math works. Over the course of a season, there’s some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There’s so much data that you can predict: individual players’ performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off.
I used to play baseball with Jake Owen when I was a kid.
I think more than anything, just putting in perspective what this baseball thing means and understanding that it is a gift and I didn’t do anything to deserve that and realizing that if we continue to look to God to guide our path, you never know what could happen.
I have been a fan all my life, but now I have been out of football for over 10 years, and out of baseball for a little over six years and I don’t go to games.
When the Japanese occupied Korea in the early 20th century, they brought their passion for baseball with them, and the game swiftly surpassed basketball and soccer as the nation’s pre-eminent sport.
