John Thorn Quotes
The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.
In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.
My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.
Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure.
But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.
Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.
This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.
We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.
Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.
In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.
Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.
Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.
Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.
If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.
And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'
Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.
The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.
Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.
Keep score, which is what the Talmud recognizes as a distinction between work and play that renders a game unfit for the Sabbath.
Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.
Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.
Except in expert hands, stats can get in the way of story; an array of data that might better be presented in a table instead clogs up sentences.
I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.
Just because I am increasingly bored by sabermetric arcana doesn't mean anyone else has to be; it remains good for people who like that sort of thing.
I am opposed, naturally, to regurgitating anecdote or any other form of received wisdom, unless it is characterized as such.