Opening Day, Baby!
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Major League Baseball opened on Monday April 1, which is kind of appropriate, considering all the practical jokes baseball players play on each other.
Not to mention how the game tends to wind us up like a cheap watch.
Yesterday was Opening Day!
In a way I’m glad this post is coming out a day later. Gives me a chance to report that the New York Mets pounded on the San Diego Padres 11 – 2.
Nothing against San Diego, but this may be the high point of the Mets season. I want to savor every moment of it.
Anyway, since baseball is the absolute bast metaphor for life in general, I figured I’d spend a little time some of the coolest baseball quotes you’ll ever see.
Tell me what you think…
“Baseball is a simple game. If you have good players, and if you keep them in the right frame of mind, then the manager is a success. The players make the manager. It’s never the other way.” Sparky Anderson
“A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz.” Humphrey Bogart
“All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.” Thomas Boswell
“Baseball isn’t statistics, it’s Joe DiMaggio rounding second base.” Jimmy Breslin
“Baseball is not a set of isolated explosions like football, but a steady, timeless pleasure that builds as gracefully as it plays–and can only have one climax. Do not mess with it, gentlemen.” Wilfrid Sheed
“You cannot hit a home run by bunting. You have to step up there and take a cut at the ball. Never be more scared of the enemy than you think he is of you.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower
“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.” Roger Kahn
“The worst thing is the day you realize you want to win more than the players do.” Gene Mauch (Manager)
“Good memories are the greatest thing in the world, and I’ve got a lot of those. And one of the sweetest is of the kid standing out on the green grass in center field, with the winning runs on base, saying to himself, ‘Hit it to me. Hit it to me.’” Pete Reiser
“Baseball is unlike football or basketball in not being governed by a clock. Until the last out has been registered, anything can happen. Even in the last of the ninth, with two out, a team can suddenly, surprisingly, score 5 or 7 or 9 or 11 runs. It is part of the brilliant fairness of the game. You must, in the end, defeat yourself, use up in vain your own equal chances.” Michael Novak
And my all time favorite “funny quote”…
“If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there is a man on base.” Dave Barry




