The National Pastime Strikes Out

Words Speak Louder than Actions in Baseball

The National Pastime Strikes Out  

Words Speak Louder than Action in Baseball.

Does anyone still believe baseball is the national pastime? Even now, at World Series time? I think baseball’s more akin to the national religion. Its impact is fading. Time has taken its usual toll.

Like other religions, baseball is under siege. The sport pages sometimes read more like the financial pages. Or the police blotter, with headlines about grand juries, not grand slams.

Make a pilgrimage to one of baseball’s storied stadia/cathedrals and you’ll find that the sport’s hierarchy – its corporate grandees--have secured the pews with the best sight lines. The rest of us can are out in the outfield, taking comfort, at six bucks a pop, for a paper cup full of baseball’s holy water: body-temperature beer.

But even agnostics like me can revel in its remembered glories. Not the great plays or the awesome stats but the words of the sport’s players, scribes and lovers. And there’s no better way to appreciate those words than Paul Dickson’s 500-page classic Baseball’s Greatest Quotations. It’s become a catechism of the game for me—a smile-inducing reminder of a love I hardly knew I still harbored.

I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, \when baseball was the national pastime. I despised and even feared playing the game. I hated it more than doing long division. More even than mowing the lawn.

Over the years, I’ve argued with and turned my back on both types of religion. But I know I’ll never completely say goodbye to either. Nor do I really want to. Both are too tightly entangled—for good and ill—in a remembered time that gives me great pleasure, despite it all.

Which is why Baseball’s Greatest Quotations is sitting, Gideon-Bible like, beside me on a hotel nightstand as I write these words during a weekend vacation. No longer in danger of being struck out, chosen last, or beaned by one of Tommy Corcoran’s furious fastballs; no longer forced to learn humiliating life lessons by shagging grounders or losing pop flies in the hot summer sun; in short, no longer having to practice the religion all the other guys loved so much, I find one of my greatest pleasures to be this: reveling in the long-ago words of baseball’s most notorious characters.

An extremely partial and necessarily random list of these characters—whose nicknames even Damon Runyon couldn’t improve upon—would include Jim “Baby Cakes” Palmer, Kenny “The Incredible Heap” Kaiser, “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry, “Say Hey” Willie Mays, and Enos “Country” Slaughter.

These names are but the wispiest helix of baseball’s indestructible DNA, as evidenced by the book’s subtitle: “From Walt Whitman to Dizzy Dean, Garrison Keillor to Woody Allen, a treasury of more than 5,000 quotations plus historical lore, notes, and illustrations.”

The book is a century-spanning sampler of mots both bon and not-so-bon, requiring no great familiarity with the quotees or the particulars of the game. Its appeal is basically nostalgic, hearkening back to the storied “simpler times” that all nostalgia encompasses. And you needn’t have lived in those times to delight in their memory.

You want simple times? Here’s the great DiMaggio, looking back on his first days in the majors:

“I can remember a reporter asking for a quote. I didn’t know what a quote was. I thought it was some kind of a soft drink.”

Keep in mind that the gifted rube who said those words went on to marry Marilyn Monroe.

You want some more? Here are a very few of the choicest bits:

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”—author Roger Kahn.

“No, why should I?”—pitcher Don Larsen, when asked if he ever got tired of speaking about his World Series perfect game.

“Finley is a self-made man who worships his creator.”—sportswriter Jim Murray, describing A’s club owner Charlie Finley.

“If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.”—New York Met Tom Seaver, circa 1969.

I could go on, but, as the great A. J. Liebling would say, it would explode me.

The book’s ultimate baseball quote belongs to Philip Roth (whose best and funniest work, The Great American Novel, is a baseball saga, natch). Here’s his description of what baseball meant to him as a kid growing up in New Jersey—a gem plucked by Dickson from the pages of The New York Times, circa 1973:

“. . .baseball—with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its ‘characters,’ its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate—was the literature of my boyhood.”

“Literature of my boyhood.” Wish I’d said that. But I’ll stick with my religious metaphor and recommend Dickson’s book to true believers and old apostates everywhere.

And, don’t forget, if memories of losing sight of a ball in a broiling centerfield sun get too much for you, you can always quench your thirst with an ice-cold can of Quote—the drink of champions! 

"Sam Rice sliding safely into 3rd base"; Library of Congress

---

This essay originally appeared in Talking Writing, an outstanding online site where I’ve been a proud featured writer. Martha Nichols, Talking Writing’s co- founder and editor in chief, also explores the whys, wherefores and hows of the writer’s craft in her Substack newsletter. No serious writer should be without either.

Publishing Information

• Baseball's Greatest Quotations by Paul Dickson, published by HarperResource, January 1991 (revised edition published by Collins Reference, September 2008).

Art Information

• "Sam Rice, of the Washington Nationals, sliding safely into 3rd base during baseball game between Washington and the Chicago White Sox," 1925; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; public domain