30 Days Hath September: Baseball Quotes for the End of Summer

THROWBACK THURSDAY

It's a long season. Beginning in the spring, when the birds fly north, you hear the first crack of the bat and hearts going pitter-patter awaiting the season opener... followed by the long weary road as the season wears on. Every day is game day with only the All Star break to interfere. 

 

Now, it's September. Pennant hopes come alive, and we see which teams have enough pitchers left who can bring them home, because by now there are a lot of tired arms out there. 

 

Baseball is a game that has inspired many a poet, journalist, philosopher and story teller. It's a sport that, to some extent, defines the American spirit. Despite numerous strikes that broke many a fan's heart, we still get that feeling in September as the days crawl toward the playoffs... At least, I still get that feeling. 

 

I admit that I'm not the fan I used to be, but I still enjoy following the game. For several years I have played Fantasy Baseball as a way of connecting with my brother, and because I am somewhat competitive (some would call that an understatement) I study pitching stats and stay current with who's hot and who's not. The name of my team, the Munger Mudcats, comes from a pitcher named Mudcat Grant, who was an ace for the Cleveland Indians when I was a kid. Grant was the only Indian who made the 1963 All Star team which I saw live in old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Munger is the community I live in now. 

 

It's hard to say whether life is more like baseball, or that baseball is like life. Here are some quotes from one of many sources on the internet that collect such pearls.
 
“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

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright; 
The band is playing somewhere; and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing; and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville-- mighty Casey has struck out.
~ Ernest Lawrence Thayer, Casey at the Bat
 
"You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.” ~ Joe DiMaggio, on Opening Day

"Slump ? I ain’t in no slump. I just ain’t hittin’.” ~ Yogi Berra

"Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many players on the field?“ ~ Jim Boulton 

"All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.’”
~ Ted Williams

"Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
~ Roger Angell

"Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly choir that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.”
~ Roger Angell

"Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.” ~ Joe Adcock

“They were starting to hit the dry side of the ball.”
~ Lew Burdette, on when he knew it was time to retire

“It’s designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
~ A. Bartlett Giamatti, Comissioner of Baseball, 1989
 
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
~ Rogers Hornsby, Hall of Famer

“Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.” ~ Bob Feller
 
“I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to keep playing baseball.”
~ Pete Rose

“When you’re in a slump, It’s almost as if you look out at the field and it’s one big glove.” ~ Vance Law
 
“The game has a cleanness. If you do a good job, the numbers say so. You don’t have to ask anyone or play politics. You don’t have to wait for the reviews.”
~ Sandy Koufax
 
“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.”
~ Robert Frost

Initially published in September 2008

This Day In History: Ted Williams Tales

THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Ted Williams hits his final homer #521 (off Jack Fisher)

Early Ted Williams baseball card
(oldest in my possession)

No question about it, Ted Williams was one of the great hitters of all time in Major League Baseball. On this day in 1941 the Boston Red Sox star ended the season with a .406 batting average, the last player to bat over .400 for a complete season. His On Base Percentage (a measure of a player's ability to get on base) was the highest of all time in pro baseball.

To illustrate OBP, consider my first year of baseball after Little League. Little League was for kids 8-12. Babe Ruth League is what you played when you were 13-18. Even though I was a Little League All Star, when I turned 13 and played in Babe Ruth League I was a runt. I never got a hit the whole season. Yet, even though I struck out 13 times, I also walked 13 times, so my On Base Percentage was .500.  That is, half the time I went to the plate I got on base.

Ted Williams got on base by base hits, but also by discipline. He made pitchers throw the ball over the plate. He did not swing wildly at pitches outside the strike zone. He wasn't ashamed to take a walk. He knew that every runner who gets on base, by any means, is a potential run.

For more read:

John Updike On Ted Williams

I consider it an honor that this blog post was re-posted on the John Updike Society website.

 

Other Events of Significance on This Day

In 1066 William the Conqueror invaded England

The Jesse James Gang's surprise attack of a train in 1864 results in 150 killed. 

In 1908 Henry Ford's first Model T rolls out of the Piquette Plant in Detroit.

In 1954, the Tonight Show premiered with host Steve Allen.

In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City.

In 2021, Ed Newman published his 5,195th post on his Ennyman's Territory blog.

Have a great, and grateful, day.

OH NO! EVERYTHING HERE IS WRONG. THIS ALL HAPPENED ON SEPT. 27.

NOT INTENDED TO BE FAKE NEWS... LET'S CALL IT MISTAKE NEWS.

My apologies to those who count on me for accurate reporting. This is a reminder to verify before you share. 

Throwback Thursday: The Greatest Baseball Player of All Time

My junior year in high school at BRHS-West I wrote a paper for English class on the theme, "Who was the greatest baseball player of all time." I was passionate about my theme because I was, at that time, passionate about the Great American Game. I researched my butt off, wrestling with the problem of establishing criteria for comparing stats of old timers and current players. I likewise had to determine how much weight to give fielding skills, leadership, base running and pitching.

When all was said and done, I wrote what I thought was a stellar paper. Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, was the greatest. And when all was said and done, Ms. Saltzbart graced that paper with a U and U-. U (Unsatisfactory) for research, and U- for the writing itself.

Now for the record, up until that time I had always been an A student. I was in the honors programs, and even in Ms. Saltzbart's class I had almost all Aces throughout the year so that my final grade averaged to be a C in the fourth quarter even with these bad marks, my first C in high school. And like the dutiful "good kid" I was, I accepted my fate... except, I had to ask why this happened. Where had I gone wrong?

When I went to speak with her after class the following day she replied that I failed because, "Joe DiMaggio is the greatest baseball player of all time." That was the sum total of why I failed. She had nothing more to say.

All these years I dismissed her conclusion as wacko. Until today, actually. It may be that all my rambling comparisons of baseball stats missed something important. In Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning Old Man and the Sea, Santiago took inspiration from DiMaggio, the man who never gave up. The theme song from the Oscar-winning The Graduate features this Paul Simon line, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" The great pop culture status icon Marilyn Monroe even married the guy. In other words, I never factored in the effect Joe DiMaggio had had on the broader culture.

Seven player strikes and all the wrangling over contracts, salaries and taxes for stadiums has taken a lot of luster off the Great American Game. There was a time when It Happens Every Spring played on Saturday Night at the Movies the weekend before the season opener. There was a time when everyone knew more than a few of the stars. And literary giants wrote about the men who played it.

One such literary giant of our century past was John Updike, and the player he wrote an incredible baseball essay about was Ted Williams. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a must read if you were ever a fan of baseball. The essay, which begins as follows, appeared in The New Yorker in 1960 back when I was reading Casper the Friendly Ghost comics. The opening is wonderful.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

Ted Williams was another of the great ones. It may be that had I read Updike before writing about Ty Cobb I would have produced a better paper. Or if I had taken a typing class freshman year instead of senior year, since my handwriting may have been a tad too illegible for a teacher staring at a pile of term papers through eyes befogged by cocktails. ("Objection! Calls for speculation.")

I would strongly encourage you to follow this link and bookmark the Updike piece. It's a masterful work and one of the greater bits of baseball literature ever written.

Trivia: Joe DiMaggio's contract, when making appearances, stipulated that he be introduced as "the greatest baseball player of all time." May we ourselves never be quite so vain.

* * * *
This blog post was originally published on August 11, 2010.
Check out this page to see who Encyclopedia Britannica's editor picked as the Top Ten Baseball Players of All Time.

A Few Baseball Quotes

It's a long season. Beginning in the spring, when the birds fly north, you hear the first crack of the bat and hearts going pitter-patter awaiting the season opener... followed by the long weary road as the season wears on. Every day is game day with only the All Star break to interfere.

Now, it's September. Pennant hopes come alive, and we see which teams have enough pitchers left who can bring them home, because now there are a lot of tired arms out there.

Baseball is a game that has inspired many a poet, journalist, philosopher and story teller. It's a sport that, to some extent, defines the American spirit. Despite numerous strikes that broke many a fan's heart, we still get that feeling in September as the days crawl toward the playoffs... At least, I still get that feeling.

I admit that I'm not the fan I used to be, but I still enjoy following the game. For several years I have played Fantasy Baseball as a way of connecting with my brother, and because I am somewhat competitive (some would call that an understatement) I study pitching stats and stay current with who's hot and who's not. The name of my team, the Munger Mudcats, comes from a pitcher named Mudcat Grant, who was an ace for the Cleveland Indians when I was a kid. Grant was the only Indian who made the 1963 All Star team which I saw live in old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Munger is the community I live in now.

It's hard to say whether life is more like baseball, or that baseball is like life. Here are some quotes from one of many sources on the internet that collect such pearls.

“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

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere; and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing; and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville-- mighty Casey has struck out.
~ Ernest Lawrence Thayer, Casey at the Bat

"You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.”
~ Joe DiMaggio, on Opening Day

”Slump ? I ain’t in no slump. I just ain’t hittin’.”
~ Yogi Berra

”Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many players on the field?“
~ Jim Boulton

"All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, ‘There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.’”
~ Ted Williams

"Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”
~ Roger Angell

"Cub fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly choir that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer and hope, in exquisite proportions.” (Note: Maybe this will be their year? Go, Cubs!)
~ Roger Angell

"Trying to sneak a fastball past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.”
~ Joe Adcock

“They were starting to hit the dry side of the ball.”
~ Lew Burdette, on when he knew it was time to retire

“It’s designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
~ A. Bartlett Giamatti, Comissioner of Baseball, 1989

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
~ Rogers Hornsby, Hall of Famer

“Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.”
~ Bob Feller

“I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to keep playing baseball.”
~ Pete Rose

“When you’re in a slump, It’s almost as if you look out at the field and it’s one big glove.”
~ Vance Law

“The game has a cleanness. If you do a good job, the numbers say so. You don’t have to ask anyone or play politics. You don’t have to wait for the reviews.”
~ Sandy Koufax

“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.”
~ Robert Frost