John Thorn Quotes (43 Quotes)

One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.

For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.

Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.

Baseball is the first of our national team sports. It is the game of memory from when we are children, not only in terms of learning how many home runs Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron hit, but in remembering the score of the game our dads first took us to or where we made that catch in center field that we still can't believe.

The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor.

It's silly, just to the ear. It implies that this team can do what no one else can, which is to be in two places at one time. Especially two places that are 35 miles apart.

Baseball leaves a footprint of all its games on our minds in a way continuous-action sports can't.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.

But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

This illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.

Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.

Keep score, which is what the Talmud recognizes as a distinction between work and play that renders a game unfit for the Sabbath.

If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail.

Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.

Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.

And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'

Baseball is in danger, everyone agrees. Player salaries are skyrocketing while revenues - and soon, perhaps, teams - are contracting.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.

From imported professionals it should have been a short step to hiring men of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds, and it was.

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.

Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.

Second place wouldn't be that important, except in this case second place is held by Babe Ruth, who is the central figure in baseball history. He is more like Paul Bunyan. He's a mythical figure. Passing Babe Ruth is a big deal, but not because he's in second place.

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.

If this is how children's play enters the adult world, is it any wonder that adults long to retire so that they can at last get their childhood right

Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?

We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different from residents of other towns, other states, other regions.

I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.