"My guiding philosophy was that playing every day for your team was the most honorable thing you could do. They were counting on you. You had a challenge that day, and you came to the ballpark to meet that challenge. You played. That was the highest level you could achieve." —quoted in The Streak: Lou [...]
"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a [...]
The Yankee franchise represents the worst side of modern baseball and is thus the fittest of villains in the cosmic drama embodied by the game. "They are the 'Dark Side.' They represent all that is evil about baseball, and about our society in general." —Bill Lee, former major league pitcher It was the late winter [...]
When the fielder loves his record More than victory for his team Doubtful chances miss his glances For his caution is extreme. Going after every grounder Means a slip-up here and there, And in terror of an error He will choose the chances fair. Spotless records are enticing In a ball game as in life, [...]
It is September that carries with it the final judgment for many baseball teams, and at times it is one particular play that decides a team’s destiny. “April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land, but for baseball fans it is the month of September that marks [...]
Recently I went to see a baseball game. The New York Yankees were playing the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium. Usually I am perfectly content to watch sports on TV in the comforts of home and avoid the contingencies of weather and traffic, and the costs of parking, tickets and concessions. I am also sensitive [...]
Baseball is more than just a sport. Its designation as a “pastime” hints at its essential conservatism as an activity borne of a vanished agrarian civilization in which leisure was valued and in which time was to be filled with imaginative human creativity. The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect [...]
Baseball is republican; baseball is deliberate; baseball is particularly American. May Little League baseball endure as long as the Republic it supports. Tonight one of the most important episodes in the life of the Gregg family came to an end. With Nolan (12) throwing a newly developed knuckle ball toward home plate, thirteen years of [...]
Among the many conversations I have had with Great Books students over the years, none is more lively than when we discuss various theories of truth. It seems to always come up when we are reading and talking about Thomas Aquinas’s Summa. In order to make immediate connection with them, I tell the story about [...]