Recall baseball comments – and ‘Batter up!’

 

Bill Knight column for 3-29, 30 or 31, 2021

Part of me is a little like Baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, who said, “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.”

Major League Baseball starts this week after last year’s pandemic-shortened season, and games will again have at least some fans, so we can go, or listen, or watch, or read the sports pages.

Reading about baseball has been a bit of a refuge, and I’ve pored over books on a few shelves, from novels and biographies to sportswriting anthologies and collections of quotes.

A variety of people have offered insights about the game:

* Economist Lawrence Ritter: “The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays.”

* Poet Gail Mazur: “Baseball holds so much of the past, pulls me back to it each year, to the soothing un-clocked, unrolling of the innings, to the sound of an announcer through an open car, the sweet attenuations of late summer afternoons. The sound of cleats on an asphalt drive, a bat cracking a ball, delirious cheers call out to surprise me in easy conversation with strangers in spring.”

* Historian Stanley Cohen: “Baseball, almost alone among our sports, traffics unashamedly and gloriously in nostalgia, for only baseball understands time and treats it with respect. The history of other sports seems to begin anew with each generation, but baseball, that wondrous myth of 20^th century America, gets passed on like an inheritance.”

* Baseball Writers’ J.G. Taylor Spink Award-winning journalist Roger Angell; “Within the ballpark, time moves differently, marked by no clock except the events of the game. ... Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”

* Award-winning political journalist Tom Wicker: “The game has changed, but it’s not fundamentally different. All the old symmetry is there – the innings and outs in their orderly multiples of threes, the foul lines radiating out to the stands, the diamond in its classic dimensions. Astroturf, designated hitters, Disneyland scoreboards, and Batting Glove Day can’t change all that.”

* Columnist George Will: “Professional football and basketball are spectacles; baseball is a habit. Even the best team will be beaten about 65 times this year, so fans are not fans if they savor only winning. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season -- these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged. As historian Bruce Catton once said, if someone from President McKinley's era were brought back and seated in a ballpark, nothing much would seem unfamiliar.”

* MLB owner Bill Veeck: “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very un-orderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”

* Rock critic Rick Johnson: “Life would be a lot more fun if you could hit a foul ball and still be up.”

* Folklorist Tristram Potter Coffin: “Sportswriters argue about whether baseball is the national game or not. It doesn’t matter. The father shoving a glove and bat into the crib of his first son is a cliché simply because it symbolizes something typical about American hopes and fears.”

* Scholar and National Medal of Arts winner Donald Hall: “My father and I played catch as I grew up. Like so much else between fathers and sons, playing catch was tender and tense at the same time. Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and games the Iroquois played. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death. The diamond encloses what we are.”

* Award-winning novelist James T. Farrell: “Baseball was part of my growing up. As a matter of fact, I understood the game and could follow the plays before I could read or write."

* Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan: “Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all. It is good to care – in any dimension. More Americans put their caring into baseball than into anything else I can think of – and most put at least a little of it there. Baseball can be trusted, as great art can, and bad art can't.”

Play ball!