Why We Love Baseball Quotes

“nothing is forgotten in baseball.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“In the end, David Freese had a fine career. It was not a Hall of Fame career. But he got a thousand hits and hit more than a hundred home runs. He made an All-Star team. A fine career. But those are just numbers. David Freese lived the dream. Do you know how many players grew up rooting for a team and then ended up playing for that team and then led that team to the World Series, then saved that team from defeat and then hit the walk-off home run that won the biggest game?”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“He struck me out three times,” Hall of Famer Frank Robinson said. “And I wasn’t even playing.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“This fella can’t hear,” one of the Phillies’ broadcasters said. “He’s a deaf player, that is correct,” another broadcaster, Harry Kalas, confirmed.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“always have loved this Willie Stargell quote: “They give you a round bat, and they throw you a round ball, and they tell you to hit it square.” Few ever did it better.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Anytime a pitcher throws a complete game shutout on fewer than 100 pitches, it is called a Maddux. Unsurprisingly, Greg Maddux has pitched the most Madduxes with 14.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“When the rain delay ended, the Cubs came out looking fresh and hungry. Schwarber raced out to the plate and lashed a single to start things off. The Cubs scored two runs. Cleveland tried to fight back one more time, but this time the comeback fell short. Mike Montgomery was on the mound for Chicago. Michael Martínez was the batter. He chopped a ground ball to third base. “Tough play,” Joe Buck said on television, but third baseman Kris Bryant had no doubts, and he grabbed the ball and threw it across the infield. As he threw, he smiled. That’s the part every Cubs fan remembers. The smile. Martínez was out, the Cubs were champions, and 108 years of sadness, heartbreak, and absurdity came down crashing. And I’ve always wondered: What the heck did Jason Heyward say?”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“The fact (at this point) is that Josh Gibson hit 165 home runs in elite Negro Leagues competition (and led the league in homers seven years in a row). The legend is that Josh Gibson once hit a home run in Pittsburgh so high that it didn’t come down. The next day, while he was playing in Philadelphia, a ball came flying in and was caught. “Gibson,” the umpire said, “you’re out. Yesterday. In Pittsburgh.” You tell me which is better.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“The fact is that researchers have determined that Cool Papa Bell stole 285 bases in elite Negro League competition. The legend is that Cool Papa Bell could turn out the lights and be in bed before the room got dark. You tell me what’s more fun.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“The ball traveled 450 feet according to one measurement, and Williams ran quickly around the bases “as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of,” Updike wrote. He then disappeared into the dugout.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Nobody knows the day it happened, the team it happened against, or any of the particulars. The story has been told a hundred different ways—many of them by Joe Jackson himself. What we do know for sure is that in 1908, while playing either semiprofessional baseball or minor league baseball in and around Greenville, a prodigy named Joe Jackson played a baseball game without shoes.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Baseball is fathers and sons,” the poet Donald Hall wrote. “Football is brothers beating each other up in the backyard.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“believe the mound visit scene in Bull Durham is the funniest scene in any baseball movie. And it almost didn’t make it into the movie. Why not? Producers didn’t think it “forwarded the plot.” They seemed unmoved by director Ron Shelton’s explanation that Bull Durham didn’t exactly have a plot.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“And then Pujols hit the monster, no-doubt home run . . . and all that sound died immediately, suddenly, like someone had hit a mute button on the city of Houston. “It was so quiet,” Sweeney says, “you could practically hear Pujols’s cleats hitting the dirt.” So yes, it’s hard to imagine a louder sound than that silence.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Sport is agony. We agree to suffer endlessly in exchange for the mere possibility of sublime rapture. Sometimes we even get it.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“The easiest way to catch the knuckleball,” Uecker later told Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, “is to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“You made me love baseball,” Lisa tells Bart on The Simpsons. “Not as a collection of numbers but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Bench shrugged and went behind home plate and called for another curveball. When Arrigo shook him off one final time Bench called for the fastball, Arrigo threw it, and Bench reached out with his right hand and caught it barehanded. “You should have seen his face,” Bench said.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments

“Baseball has no slam dunks, no breakaways, and little violence. There is no goal and no goal line, no basket, and no finish line. There are no blocked shots, no blindside hits, no blocked punts, no electrifying runs, no alley-oop passes, no kick saves, and no bicycle kicks. Baseball does have math, though. Lots of math.”
― Joe Posnanski, Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments