HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY
November 5, 2007
Wisdom from Polonius
Thoughts of Baseball
Peter Ueberroth
Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.
Scott Sanders
In baseball, home plate is where you begin your journey and also your destination. You venture out onto the bases, to first and second and third, always striving to return to the spot from which you began. There is danger on the basepath—pick-offs, rundowns, force-outs, double plays—and safety only back at home. I am not saying, as a true fan would, that baseball is the key to life; rather, life is the key to baseball. We play or watch this game because it draws pictures of our desires.
Yogi Berra
What difference does the uniform make? You don’t hit with it.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
John Leonard
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
Richard Ford
It’s just a game—baseball—an amusement, a marginal thing, not an art, not a consequential metaphor for life, not a public trust. It may have broken Bart Giamatti’s sentimental heart, but it will never break mine.... In its behind-the-scenes machinations as sport, baseball has developed unexpected ties to big-time professional wrestling, with that strange spectacle’s buffoonish, self-important, overstuffed Steinbrennerish management types spouting gibberish about the best interests of this and such and the need for moral direction, all in counterpoise to sullenly big-muscled, bad-boy superstars nattering and snuffling about not getting any respect and not being in it for the dough, and being in it for the dough.
Melvin Maddocks
Watching baseball under the lights is like observing dogs indoors, at a pedigree show. In both instances, the environment is too controlled to suit the species.
Robert Frost
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Harry Reasoner
Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom’s apple pie.
Roger Kahn
I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press.
Jacques Barzun
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.
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