Inspiring baseball quotes from players, coaches and fans alike. If these quotes don’t get you out to the ballpark, we don’t know what will!
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“A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
Jim Bouton
“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.”
Babe Ruth
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Yogi Berra
“People ask me what I do in the winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Rogers Hornsby
“Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”
Leo Durocher
“No matter how good you are, you’re going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you’re going to win one-third of your games. It’s the other third that makes the difference.”
Tommy Lasorda
“Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”
Yogi Berra
“A man has to have goals – for a day, for a lifetime – and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
Ted Willams
“Pitching is the art of instilling fear.”
Sandy Koufax
“I don’t rate them, I just hit them.”
Willie Mays
“You don’t ask the sun why you orbit, you just orbit. You let the gravitational waves of the baseball season pull you in and you surrender yourself, happily.”
Greg Larson, Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir
“Fenway is the essence of baseball”
Tom Seaver
“If my uniform doesn’t get dirty, I haven’t done anything in the baseball game.”
Rickey Henderson
“More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.”
Thomas Boswell
“Ideally, the umpire should combine the integrity of a Supreme Court judge, the physical agility of an acrobat, the endurance of Job and the imperturbability of Buddha.”
Time Magazine
“Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game!”
Babe Ruth
“There’s a reason diehard fans get to the ballpark hours before game time. It’s not for better parking. It’s not for extra time to find our seats. It’s not so we’ll have time to down an extra hot dog, heavy on the mustard, prior to the first pitch. It’s called BP.”
Tucker Elliot, Major League Baseball IQ: The Ultimate Test of True Fandom
“Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.”
Mary McGrory
“There are three types of baseball players: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”
Tommy Lasorda
“A Coyote game of paths and chances.”
Michael Chabon, Summerland
“I floated away into that omnipresent timelessness of baseball, where boys with a dream and long-expired Major Leaguers orbit forever on equal planes.”
Greg Larson, Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir
“When life throws you a curveball, hit out of the park.”
Shanka Jayasinha, Don’t Settle
“Baseball makes you feel like you have an American smile.”
Anthony T. Hincks
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the two most important things in life are good friends and a good bullpen.”
Bob Lemon
“The bat and the ball only matter because we stepped up to the plate.”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
“Base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character.”
Walt Whitman
“Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.”
Yogi Berra, Yogi: The Autobiography of a Professional Baseball Player
“Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking, just have fun.”
The Sandlot
“You never know what’s going to happen… And that’s the fun of it!! That’s what baseball’s all about!!”
Keiichi Arawi
“Never save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.”
Leo Durocher
“That’s why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do in life, keep track of my errors.”
Michael Chabon, Summerland
“You can get base hits or home runs, but you can’t get a grand slam without both.”
Richie Norton
“It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.”
Bill Vaughn, First, a Little Chee-Chee: Then Some Other Weird Sports
“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.”
Babe Ruth
“There’s no crying in baseball!”
A League of Their Own
“A no-hitter secures a pitcher’s spot on an elite yet diverse list that embraces Hall of Famers, struggling journeymen, and wide-eyed rookies.”
Dirk Lammers, Baseball’s No-Hit Wonders: More Than a Century of Pitching’s Greatest Feats
“The next time someone whines that baseball doesn’t have enough action, you can do two things: first, explain the planning, strategizing, calculating, and deception that place before every pitch. “Then quote Hall-of-Fame announcer Red Barber: “Baseball is dull only to dull minds.”
Zack Hample, Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan’s Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks
“Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”
Yogi Berra
“My motto was always to keep swinging.”
Hank Aaron
“Baseball is a good thing. Always was, always will be.”
Stephen King, Blockade Billy
“It’s the mathematical potential for a single game to last forever, in a suspended world where no clock rules the day, that aligns baseball as much with the dead as the living.”
Bill Vaughn
“Open your heart to a baseball team and you’re liable to get it broken.”
Jane Heller
Tom Swyers
“Four out of five doctors prescribe baseball for whatever ails you. The fifth guy is a quack.”
“Today a pitcher gets fined if the umpire thinks he threw at a batter. In the olden days, the umpire didn’t have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you.”
Leo Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last
“There may be people that have more talent than you, but there is no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.”
Derek Jeter
“A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.”
Thomas Boswell, Why Time Begins on Opening Day
“A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz.”
Humphrey Bogart
“Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.”
Thomas Boswell, How Life Imitates the World Series
“True baseball fans do not cheer for their teams to win; they cheer for them not to lose. Victory does not come with joy, it comes with relief. Losing causes only pain.”
Will Leitch
“You wanna have a catch?”
Field of Dreams
Hopefully this list of baseball quotes has you inspired to get out to the ballpark or have a catch in the backyard!
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