John Thorn Quotes

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

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster ... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.

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

I'd just like to see - in writing about baseball - more energy and better craft, minus statistical bludgeoning and invective.

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.

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.

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.

If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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 illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.