Pam and Harrison are the sports fans in the family and I would venture to say that their two favorite sports are baseball and football (the American one). I can understand the former much better than the latter. I would never go to sleep lulled by the mellifluous tones of the baseball broadcasters by choice but the other night. . . I did. Pam fell asleep as the Orioles and Rays began their extra innings. I slept fitfully but managed to make enough sense of the broadcast each time I awoke to know that it was still undecided. About 2:05 and 18 innings since the game began, I heard the bad news (for Baltimore fans). . . the Os lost.
(from http://www.peterga.com/baseball/quotes/the_game.htm)
Mark Twain
Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.
W.P. Kinsella
It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.
Bernard Malamud:
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
John Cheever
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
Roger Angell, "Agincourt and After," Five Seasons:
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
8 year-old Jewish boy, quoted in "The Children's God", (Psychology Today Dec. 1985)
I don't know if this is what you're asking. But I feel closest to God, like after I'm rounding second base after I hit a double.
James Thurber
The majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees.
Norman Cousins
At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"
What do you think?
Tell me at
http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
My latest release, Black & White Then Back,
can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak3)
Also, be sure to visit:
http://www.rayjozwiak.com
Tweet
