baseball Quotes

“The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings he heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike.”

“He coulda been a king.”

“The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”

“When Bump died Memo went wild with grief...her womb stirring at the image of his restoration. Yet she saw down a dark corridor that he was laid out dead, gripping in his fingers the glowing ball he had caught.”

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was the biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky.”

“Sometimes when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in the game.”

“And with a magnificent twisting jump, he trapped the ball in his iron fingers. Yet the wall continued to advance, and...Bump bumped it with a skull-breaking bang.”

“Roy caught the pitcher’s eye. His own had blood in them. Youngberry shuddered. He threw—a bad ball—but the batter leaped at it. He struck out with a roar.”

“Roy found himself looking around every so often to make sure he was here. He was, all right, yet in all his imagining of how it would be when he finally hit the majors, he had not expected to feel so down in the dumps.”

“Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking.

“Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it’s still being made all over the place, all the time.”

“The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.”

“There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn’t?”

“It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players.”

“I waded around in the diamonds, picked up great handfuls of the jewels letting the smaller ones slip through my fingers. I juggled with two heavy diamonds the size of baseballs. I suddenly felt like a small child let loose in a candy shop.”