Baseball is one of the most popular sports in America. It’s also one of the games developed in America alongside basketball. Americans consider this sport as their “national pastime.”
Baseball is a game played using a bat, a ball, a glove between two opposing teams of nine players. The two teams alternate as fielders (defense) and batters (offense). The fielders must prevent the batters from becoming runners and advancing to different bases, while the batters must hit the ball and score as they push to different bases. The team that has scored the most runs by the end of the game wins.
If basketball has NBA, then baseball has the MLB or Major League Baseball. Some of its most famous players include Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, and Lou Gehrig.
Swing that bat, hit that ball, and score that home run. Here are several of the best motivational baseball quotes and sayings.
1. “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.” — James Patrick Murray
2. “On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.” — A. Bartlett Giamatti
3. “In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted, if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.” — Tom Seaver
4. “Baseball life is a tough life on the family.” — Nolan Ryan
5. “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.” — Bill Veeck
6. “You have to go understand that life and baseball is littered with all kinds of obstacles and problems along the way. You have to learn how to overcome them to be successful in life.” — Dave Winfield
7. “Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm.” — Ernie Harwell
8. “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.” — Robert Frost
9. “Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.” — Bob Lemon
10. “You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the damn plate and five the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.” — Earl Weaver
11. “Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.” — Leo Durocher
12. “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
13. “Boys, baseball is a game where you gotta have fun. You do that by winning.” — Dave Bristol
14. “To the people out there, baseball is a simple sport. But it is complex. It is never easy.” — Dave Winfield
15. “Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion.” — Ernie Harwell
16. “Baseball was the darling of all sports back then.” — Marion Motley
17. “Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?” — Jim Bouton
18. “Now there’s three things you can do in a baseball game: You can win or you can lose or it can rain.” — Casey Stengel
19. “Baseball hasn’t forgotten me. I go to a lot of old-timers games and I haven’t lost a thing. I sit in the bullpen and let people throw things at me. Just like old times.” — Bob Uecker
20. “The trouble with baseball is that it is not played the year round.” — Gaylord Perry
21. “Baseball is all about pitching, and we know we have to improve our pitching.” — Tom Hicks
22. “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
23. “A cloud hangs over baseball. It’s a cloud called drugs and it’s permeated our game.” — Peter Ueberroth
24. “Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.” — Mary McGrory
25. “Baseball is a man maker.” — Al Spalding
26. “Baseball is more than a game. It’s like life played out on a field.” — Juliana Hatfield
27. “Baseball was socially relevant, and so was my rebellion against it.” — Curt Flood
28. “Baseball is a game of inches.” — Branch Rickey
29. “Baseball must be a great game to survive the fools who run it.” — Bill Terry
30. “The great thing about baseball is there’s a crisis every day.” — Gabe Paul
31. “One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something.” — Nolan Ryan
32. “Young players need to know how to take care of themselves for life after baseball.” — Barry Bonds
33. “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.” — John Thorn
34. “Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.” — Whitey Herzog
35. “Baseball gives a growing boy self poise and self reliance.” — Al Spalding
36. “Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.” — Yogi Berra
37. “The good rising fastball is the best pitch in baseball.” — Tom Seaver
38. “There is no room in baseball for discrimination. It is our national pastime and a game for all.” — Lou Gehrig
39. “When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game.” — Joe DiMaggio
40. “I was born to play baseball.” — Roberto Clemente
41. “Baseball gets better for whatever reason.” — Rafael Palmeiro
42. “Only in baseball can a team player be a pure individualist first and a team player second, within the rules and spirit of the game.” — Branch Rickey
43. “Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It’s no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It’s a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.” — Ty Cobb
44. “What I miss when I’m away is the pride in baseball. Especially the pride of being on a team that wins.” — Billy Martin
45. “Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game.” — Ted Williams
46. “A baseball swing is a very finely tuned instrument. It is repetition, and more repetition, then a little more after that.” — Reggie Jackson
47. “To me, baseball has always been a reflection of life. Like life, it adjusts. It survives everything.” — Willie Stargell
48. “You can’t get real happy or real depressed when you play baseball. Baseball is a great sport in that it offers a player a lot of opportunities for atonement.” — Mike Piazza
49. “Luck is the great stabilizer in baseball.” — Tris Speaker
50. “Baseball people, and that includes myself, are slow to change and accept new ideas. I remember that it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms.” Branch Rickey
51. “Baseball is a game of race, creed, and color. The race is to first base. The creed is the rules of the game. The color? Well, the home team wears white uniforms, and the visiting team wears gray.” — Joe Garagiola
52. “Perhaps the truest axiom in baseball is that the toughest thing to do is repeat.” — Walt Alston
53. “Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.” — Peter Ueberroth
54. “Baseball regards us as sheep.” — Curt Flood
55. “Baseball is only a game, a game of inches and a lot of luck. During a time of all-out war, sports are very insignificant.” — Bob Feller
56. “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
57. “Baseball for me was instinctive, born within me, given to me as a gift from God.” — Willie Stargell
58. “Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.” — Sydney Madwed
59. “A catcher must want to catch. He must make up his mind that it isn’t the terrible job it is painted, and that he isn’t going to say every day, ‘Why, oh why with so many other positions in baseball did I take up this one.'” — Bill Dickey
60. “Baseball has been very good to me.” — Roberto Clemente
61. “Baseball was a dream I gathered more splinters than hits.” — Frank Perdue
62. “Baseball is like driving, it’s the one who gets home safely that counts.” — Tommy Lasorda
63. “It was all I lived for, to play baseball.” — Mickey Mantle
64. “Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn’t speak very much for the larger culture.” — Michael Lewis
65. “Baseball is a simple game. If you have good players and if you keep them in the right frame of mind then the manager is a success.” — Sparky Anderson
66. “I never ride just to ride. I ride to catch a fox. I play baseball to make the team.” — Sargent Shriver
67. “Baseball hasn’t been the national pastime for many years now – no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.” — Bob Greene
68. “Baseball player. Yeah, that was my dream before acting, or alongside acting.” — Shemar Moore
69. “When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.” — Ty Cobb
70. “Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.” — Bill Veeck
71. “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
72. “Baseball is dull only to dull minds.” — Red Barber
73. “Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.” — Babe Ruth
74. “Baseball is a rookie, his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream.” — Ernie Harwell
75. “Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.” — Joe Garagiola
76. “It’s such a beautiful sport, with no politics involved, no color, no class. Only as a youngster can you play and as a pro can you win. The game has kept me young, involved and excited and for me to be up here with gems of baseball.” — Jack Buck
77. “Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal.” — Pete Rose
78. “The genius of our institutions is democratic – baseball is a democratic game.” — Al Spalding
79. “Baseball is more than a game to me, it’s a religion.” — Bill Klem
80. “In baseball, you can’t kill the clock. You’ve got to give the other man his chance. That’s why this is the greatest game.” — Earl Weaver
81. “The greatest challenge I think is adjusting to not playing baseball. The reason for that is I had to come out of baseball and come into the business world, not being a college graduate, not being educated to come into the business world the way I should have.” — Willie Mays
82. “Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.” — George Bernard Shaw
83. “Like baseball, food will never go out of style we will always need to eat and we will always find it entertaining. I think of food TV this way – all the fun and none of the calories.” — Gail Simmons
84. “Watching baseball under the lights is like observing dogs indoors, at a pedigree show. In both instances, the environment is too controlled to suit the species.” — Melvin Maddocks
85. “I played baseball because I could make more money doing that than I could doing anything else.” — Bill Terry
86. “Never bet on baseball.” — Pete Rose
87. “Baseball needs to put the steroids era behind it by having and enforcing tough rules against all kinds of artificial advantages, so that spring can return.” — Marvin Olasky
88. “The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.” — Hank Aaron
89. “The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three run homers.” — Earl Weaver
90. “Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.” — John Leonard
91. “A baseball manager is a necessary evil.” — Sparky Anderson
92. “There are only five things you can do in baseball – run, throw, catch, hit and hit with power.” — Leo Durocher
93. “Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.” — Jim Jarmusch
94. “Baseball was, is and always will be to me the best game in the world.” — Babe Ruth
95. “In baseball, there’s always the next day.” — Ryne Sandberg
96. “No baseball pitcher would be worth a darn without a catcher who could handle the hot fastball.” — Casey Stengel
97. “Baseball has long been a national pastime that many Americans have cherished.” — Jim Sensenbrenner
98. “Baseball is a team game.” — Eddie Murray
99. “I play to represent God, something bigger than baseball.” — Albert Pujols
100. “The great thing about baseball is the causality is easy to determine and it always falls on the shoulders of one person. So there is absolute responsibility. That’s why baseball is psychologically the cruelest sport and why it really requires psychological resources to play baseball – because you have to learn to live with failure.” — Michael Mandelbaum
101. “Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what is most truly is is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.” — Willie Mays
102. “You can’t be afraid to make errors! You can’t be afraid to be naked before the crowd, because no one can ever master the game of baseball, or conquer it. You can only challenge it.” — Lou Brock
