"Went to Stoke Ch. This morning. After Dinner Went to Miss Jeale's to play at Base Ball with her, the 3 Miss Whiteheads, Miss Billinghurst, Miss Molly Flutter, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Ford & H. Parsons & Jelly. Drank Tea and stayed till 8."
1858, Ball Days
Come, base ball players all and listen to the song
About our manly Yankee game, and pardon what is wrong;
If the verses do not suit you, I hope the chorus will,
So join with us, one and all, and sing it with a will.
Then shout, shout for joy, and let the welkin ring,
In praises of our noble game, for health 'tis sure to bring;
Come, my brave Yankee boys, there's room enough for all,
So join in Uncle Samuel's sport—the pastime of base ball.
Many times have I been asked the question, "To what do you ascribe the great popularity of base ball?" This, seems to me, can be answered in just two words, "The excitement."
Put a base ball uniform on a boy, and you can starve him for a week afterwards. But while you are starving him, allow him to keep the clothes in the room with him. The moment he puts that uniform on, he's the proudest bit of humanity in all this world.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad. You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you've been a boy, and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime.
The only real game — I think — in the world is baseball.
But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner.
George Grella, The Melancholy of Baseball
It creates an immense green field, a gorgeous vista invoking the pastoral, the agricultural, even the peaceable kingdom, but it hints that the lush green garden may also be a vale of tears. Baseball is the saddest game.
Alvin L. Hall
Baseball is regarded as a quintessential American sport. So to understand American culture, you have to understand baseball.
Donald Hall
Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.
I know how lucky I've been in life, more than anybody will ever know. I've lived a kind of precarious life style, precarious in sports, flying and baseball. And oh boy. I know how lucky I've been.
