Pete's Baseball Quotes

Teams, Cities & Ballparks

Charles Dryden:
Washington -- first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.

Roger Kahn:
For the Washington Senators, the worst time of the year is the baseball season.

John Cheever:
All literary men are Red Sox fans. To be a Yankee fan in literary society is to endanger your life.

John Updike:
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.

Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe (Sports Illustrated 6/28/93):
Defensively the Red Sox are a lot like Stonehenge. They are old, they don't move, and no one is certain why they are positioned the way they are.

George V. Higgins:
The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

Mike Barnicle:
Baseball isn't a life-and-death matter, but the Red Sox are.

Thomas Boswell:
An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink....No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

Stephen King:
The best show on television is Red Sox baseball. Everything else sucks.

Joe E. Lewis:
Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.

Mike Flannagan:
I could never play in New York. The first time I ever came into a game there, I got in the bullpen car and they told me to lock the doors.

Graig Nettles:
When I was a kid, I wanted to play baseball and join the circus. With the Yankees, I've been able to do both.

Bill Lee:
The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he's going to be. You take a team with twenty-five assholes and I'll show you a pennant. I'll show you the New York Yankees.

Mike Royko:
Hating the Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

Mike Royko:
New York didn't need that 1969 pennant...all Cub fans wanted was that one measly pennant. It would have kept us happy until the twenty-first century. But New York took that from us and I can never forgive that.

Casey Stengel, on the Amazin' Mets:
They've shown me ways to lose I never knew existed.

Groucho Marx, upon hearing that Leo Durocher was leading the Giants:
Yes, and so is everyone else in the league.

Joe Garagiola:
The Chicago Cubs are like Rush Street -- a lot of singles, but no action.

George Will:
Since 1946, the Cubs have had two problems: They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many. So what is the new management improving? The scoreboard.

Jean Shepherd:
Being a White Sox fan meant measuring victory in terms of defeat. A 6-5 defeat was a good day. A big rally was Wally Moses doubling down the right- field line.

Leo Durocher:
It's possible to spend money anywhere in the world if you put your mind to it, something I proved conclusively by running up huge debts in Cincinnati.

Richie Scheinblum:
The only good thing about playing for Cleveland is you don't have to make road trips there.

Lon Simmons, A's announcer:
The A's leave after this game for Cleveland. It was only by a 13-12 vote that they decided to go.

Roger Angell:
No one booed an Astro player. No one got into a fight; a fight at the Astrodome would be as shocking as fisticuffs in the College of Cardinals.

Frank Coniff, New York writer, on San Francisco:
What a town. They boo Willie Mays and cheer Khrushchev.

Lowell Cohn:
Whenever the Giants call to talk about trades, I bet more than one general manager has had to hold a pillow over his face to keep from laughing into the phone.

Bill Veeck:
The Mets achieved total incompetence in a single year, while the Browns worked industriously for almost a decade to gain equal proficiency.

Jim Bouton, Seattle Pilots pitcher:
We already know we were going to lose the second game, too. We just didn't know what the score was going to be.

Andy Van Slyke, on why the Pirates didn't catch the Mets:
You can't expect Mr. Ed to keep up with Secretariat.

Richard Justice of AOL.com on the reaction to Buck Showalter's plan to ban the media from watching the first hour of 2004 Texas Rangers workouts each day:
Reporters begged him to make it two.

Pete's Baseball Quotes