John Thorn

“The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor.”

“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.”

“More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.”

“We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different from residents of other towns, other states, other regions.”

“This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.”

“There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.”

“As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.”

“Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.”