Baseball Quotes

Baseball Quotes provide players’ insights, bring us closer to the game, and provide us inspiration.

These selected quotations are for lovers of the game, including players, fans, and coaches. Learn insights from players, managers, and sportscasters on our national pastime.

Baseball’s enduring appeal is partially due to the wide variety of personalities that play, manage, and write about the game. They are full of insights into America’s national pastime. Enjoy!

Best Baseball Quotes

1.) It ain’t nothin’ till I call it.
Bill Klem, Major League Baseball umpire

2.) Why does everybody stand up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” when they’re already there?
Larry Anderson

3.) A hot dog at the ballgame beats roast beef at the Ritz.
Humphrey Bogart

4.) You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.
Roy Campanella

5.) Trying to sneak a pitch past Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster.
Joe Adcock — You might like The Hank Aaron Story.

6.) That rain delay was the most important thing to happen to the Chicago Cubs in the past 100 years. I don’t think there’s any way we win the game without it.
Anthony Rizzo

See the History of the Anthem “Go Cubs Go”

7.) Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.
Unknown

8.) Let’s play two.
Ernie Banks

See Baseball Slogans.

Baseball Players’ and Managers’ Quotes

9.) It’s crazy how things happen for a reason — I love when players have meetings; I hate when I do. So they had their meeting, and the big part of it was, We don’t quit. We don’t quit.
Joe Maddon

10.) There are three things you can do in a baseball game. You can win, or you can lose, or it can rain.
Casey Stengel

11.) Baseball is a lot like life. It’s a day-to-day existence full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life.
Ernie Harwell (sportscaster for 55 years)

12.) My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly, or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.
Hank Aaron

Famous Quotations on our National Pastime

13.) Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man’s hand. Pick it up, and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance — thrown hard and with precision.
Roger Angell

14.) I said before the Series that a sweep wouldn’t do it…It would have to be something epic. And that was epic, wasn’t it?
Tom Ricketts, Cubs Owner

15.) The game is an island of activity amidst a sea of statistics
Unknown

16.) Baseball is dull only to dull minds.
Red Barber

17.) Back, back, back, back… Gone!
Chris Berman

18.) The game isn’t over till it’s over.
Yogi Berra

19.) It ain’t like football. You can’t make up no trick plays.
Yogi Berra

20.) More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.
Thomas Boswell

21.) That’s something that made this organization what it is now. From my position, I can see it: the sacrifice the scouts make when they drive the extra miles to get that last look at a player, the minor league coaches putting in extra hours, the big league coaches crushing video, the players working on their weaknesses, picking their teammates up. That’s what makes a great organization. That’s Cub.
Theo Epstein

Funny Yogi Berra Quotes

22.) Little things are big.

23.) I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

24.) Take it with a grin of salt.

25.) Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.

26.) I looked like this when I was young, and I still do.

27.) Slump? I ain’t in no slump — I just ain’t hitting.

28.) If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.

29.) Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.

30.) You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.

31.) The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.

32.) So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.

Famous Babe Ruth Baseball Quotes

33.) If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.

34.) I hear the cheers when they roared and the jeers when they echoed.

35.) To my sick little pal. I will try to knock you another homer, maybe two today.

36.) Never let the fear of striking out keep you from coming up to bat.

37.) I had only one superstition. I made sure to touch all the bases when I hit a home run.

38.) Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

39.) The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball.

Baseball Sayings

40.) You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.
Jim Bouton

41.) Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.
Lou Brock

42.) Baseball is the only place in life where a sacrifice is really appreciated.
Unknown

43.) It could be, it might be… It is, A home run!
Harry Caray

44.) The way to make coaches think you’re in shape in the spring is to get a tan.
Whitey Ford

45.) I’ve only been doing this for fifty-four years. With a little experience, I might get better.
Harry Caray

46.) Hello again, everybody… It’s a bee-yoo-tiful day for baseball.
Harry Caray

47.) My whole philosophy is to broadcast the way a fan would broadcast.
Harry Caray

Game Quotes

48.) Pro-rated at 500 at-bats a year, that means that for two years out of the fourteen I played, I never even touched the ball.
Norm Cash, on his 1,081 strikeouts

49.) All game long, I was burning nervous energy. I was a wreck. I thought about all the people in Chicago and how much this meant to them. But after we had that meeting, I knew we were going to win. It was only a matter of how and when.
Anthony Rizzo

50.) When you’ve learned to believe in yourself, there’s no telling how good a player you can be. That’s because you have a mental edge.
Rod Carew

51.) Say this much for big league baseball – it is beyond question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.
Bruce Catton

52.) I’m convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile.
Tom Clark

53.) I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.
Ty Cobb

54.) When I played ball, I didn’t play for fun. It’s no pink tea, and Mollycoddles had better stay out. It’s a contest and everything that implies a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.
Ty Cobb

55.) They usually show movies on a flight like that.
Ken Coleman

Great Sayings for Baseball Fans

56.) You don’t need a catcher. The ball goes to the backstop.
Unknown

57.) The burden has been lifted. It should have never been there in the first place, I don’t think, but now we can move forward.
Joe Maddon, Cubs Manager

58.) A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can and does, devour any set of diamond statistics with an insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more.
Arthur Daley

59.) Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That’s baseball as it should be played – in God’s own sunshine. And that’s really living.
Alvin Dark

60.) The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid. And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he’s timid.
Don Drysdale

Motivational Quotations

61.) You don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.
Leo Durocher

62.) What are we at the park for except to win? I’d trip my mother. I’d help her up, brusher her off, tell her I’m sorry. But mother don’t make it to third.
Leo Durocher

63.) Sweat plus sacrifice equals success.
Charlie Finley

64.) A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.
Ray Fitzgerald

65.) Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost

66.) No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result so cleanly defined.
Paul Gallico

67.) It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring when everything else begins 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

Famous Baseball Quotes

68.) When I knocked a guy down, there was no second part to the story.
Bob Gibson

69.) The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love.
Bryant Gumbel

70.) Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime, and they’re knocking baseball around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning, and the kids are trying to hit the curveball.
Pete Hamill

71.) Baseball is the only sport I know that when you’re on offense, the other team controls the ball.
Ken Harrelson

72.) Baseball? It’s just a game – as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit, it symbolizes. It’s a sport, business – and sometimes even religion.
Ernie Harwell

73.) Baseball is a ballet without music—drama without words.
Ernie Harwell

74.) 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

75.) I don’t want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it.
Rogers Hornsby

76.) To a pitcher, a base hit is the perfect example of negative feedback.
Steve Hovley

77.) Watching a spring training game is as exciting as watching a tree form its annual ring.
Jerry Izenberg

Awesome Baseball Quotes

78.) Every hitter likes fastballs, just like everybody likes ice cream. But you don’t like it when someone’s stuffing it into you by the gallon. That’s what it feels like when Nolan Ryan’s thrown balls by you.
Reggie Jackson

79.) Well, I can’t rightly say (which player hit the ball hardest), but the ones (home runs by) Ruth hit got smaller quicker.
Walter Johnson

80.) Baseball is a harbor, a seclusion from failure that really matters, a playful utopia in which virtuosity can be savored to the third decimal place of a batting average.
Mark Kramer

81.) Basketball, hockey, and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker’s responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for unchanging dreams.
Roger Kahn

82.) Close doesn’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades.
Frank Robinson

Memorable Sayings

83.) It ain’t nothin’ till I call it.
Umpire Bill Klem

84.) You wanna have a catch?
Field of Dreams Movie Dialogue

85.) I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it.
Sandy Koufax

86.) Never save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.
Leo Durocher

87.) The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
Tommy Lasorda

88.) 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

Major League Baseball Quotes

89.) The saddest day of the year is the day baseball season ends.
Tommy Lasorda

90.) There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.
Charlie Lau

91.) 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

92.) Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.
Bob Lemon

93.) I’ve come to the conclusion that the two most important things in life are good friends and a good bullpen.
Bob Lemon

94.) I don’t care how long you’ve been around; you’ll never see it all.
Bob Lemon

95.) Life will always throw you curves; just keep fouling them off. The right pitch will come, but when it does, be prepared to run the bases.
Rick Maksian

The Mick Baseball Quotes

96.) During my 18 years, I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.
Mickey Mantle

97.) When Steve and I die, we are going to be buried in the same cemetery, 60 feet 6 inches apart.
Tim McCarver, who caught all of Steve Carlton’s games

98.) Like those special afternoons in summer when you go to Yankee Stadium at two o’clock in the afternoon for an eight o’clock game. It’s so big, so empty, and so silent that you can almost hear the sounds that aren’t there.
Ray Miller

Interesting Sayings

99.) It actually giggles at you as it goes by.
Rick Monday on Phil Niekro’s Knuckleball

100.) Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the house in blackjack.
Adam Morrow

101.) Sandy’s fastball was so fast; some batters would start to swing as he was on his way to the mound.
Jim Murray on Sandy Koufax

102.) Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire’s eye or on the ball.
Jim Murray

103.) The charm of baseball is that, dull as it may be on the field, it is endlessly fascinating as a rehash.
Jim Murray

104.) Get out the rye bread and mustard, grandma, cause it’s GRAND SALAMI TIME!
Dave Niehaus

Satchel Paige Baseball Quotes

105.) Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.

106.) Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

107.) Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.

108.) How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

109.) Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. The home plate don’t move.

110.) My pitching philosophy is simple – keep the ball away from the bat.

111.) Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.

The Game has been very, very good to me

112.) It is well to remember that a Martian observing his first baseball game would be quite correct in concluding that the last two words of the National Anthem are: PLAY BALL!
Herbert H. Paper

113.) Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.
Jackie Robinson

118.) The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
Babe Ruth — Check out The Japanese Babe Ruth.

119.) Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.
Babe Ruth

120.) Well, boys, it’s a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit the ball square.
Joe Schultz

Great Sayings About Baseball

121.) I believe in the Church of Baseball. I tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary, and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance.
Ron Shelton

122.) Putting lights in Wrigley Field is like putting aluminum siding on the Sistine Chapel.
Roger Simon

123.) Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection.
Red Smith

124.) You know you’re pitching well when the batters look as bad as you do at the plate.
Duke Snider

125.) Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.
Warren Spahn

126.) When they start the game, they don’t yell, “Work ball.” They say, “Play ball.”
Willie Stargell

127.) I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice.
Casey Stengel

128.) It’s hard to win a pennant, but it’s harder losing one.
Chuck Tanner

129.) The greatest feeling in the world is to win a major league game. The second-greatest feeling is to lose a major league game.
Chuck Tanner

130.) The best way to catch a knuckleball is to wait until the ball stops rolling and then pick it up.
Bob Uecker

Note: If you have any suggested baseball quotes for this page, please let us know.

Bill Veeck’s Words of Wisdom

131.) Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.

132.) That’s the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on a ball.
(Editor’s pick for one of our favorite baseball quotes)

133.) This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There’s time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

134.) I have discovered in twenty years of moving around a ballpark that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

135.) The season starts too early and finishes too late, and there are too many games in between.

Tip: Some of these baseball quotes make great photo captions.

True Fan Quotations

136.) I see great things in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, and give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.
Walt Whitman

137.) Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
Frederick B. Wilcox

138.) Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.
George F. Will

139.) Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.
Ted Williams

140.) A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.
Earl Wilson

141.) Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business and too much of a business to be called a sport.
Philip Wrigley

142.) Pitchers, like poets, are born, not made.
Cy Young

Funny Baseball Quotes

143.) Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand.
Leo Ernest Durocher

144.) If my uniform doesn’t get dirty, I haven’t done anything in the baseball game.
Rickey Henderson

145.) 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

146.) Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal.
Pete Rose

147.) It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.
Hank Aaron

148.) I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.
Willie Mays

149.) Close doesn’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades
Frank Robinson

150.) Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.
Jim Jarmusch

151.) If you’re going to play at all, you’re out to win. Baseball, board games, Jeopardy, I hate to lose.
Derek Jeter

152.) The funny thing about these uniforms is that you hang them in the closet, and they get smaller and smaller.
Curt Flood

Amusing Insights on Baseball

These baseball quotes are worthy of a chuckle or two.

153.) 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

154.) If you have a bad day in baseball and start thinking about it, you will have ten more.
Sammy Sosa

155.) If the people don’t wanna come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them.
Yogi Berra

156.) Bob Gibson is the luckiest pitcher I ever saw. He always pitches when the other team doesn’t score any runs.
Tim McCarver

157.) All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a doubleheader.
George Will

158.) Us ballplayers do things backward. First, we play, then we retire and go to work.
Charlie Gehringer

Inspiring Baseball Quotes

159.) Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind you 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

160.) You’ve got to give the other man his chance. That’s why this is the greatest game.
Earl Weaver

161.) There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all.
Lou Gehrig

162.) Baseball is such a tough game; it really humbles you at times; you just have to try not to get too high or too low.
Chase Utley

163.) 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

164.) The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three-run homers.
Earl Weaver

165.) Baseball is about talent, hard work, and strategy. But at the deepest level, it’s about love, integrity, and respect.
Pat Gillick

Compiled by the Staff at Sports Feel Good Stories

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