Baseball Fundamentals Quotes

The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.

When blue-collar, white workers in middle America look at Donald Trump in his fill-fitting suit and baseball cap, with a physical image that is perhaps more like their own, they see a possibility that they could be him. Aside from his skin colour, Barack Obama, with his lean physique, good looks and charisma, hanging out with rock stars and movie stars, his life and what he stands for seems at a far remove. Except the reality is that he was raised without his father, cared for by his grandparents and moved around a lot as a child, meaning he has potentially much more in common with the Appalachian voters than Donald Trump. He lived and achieved the American Dream in arguably a more fundamental way than Trump did.

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto. But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

In a baseball game, the team that best executes the fundamentals of the game – hits, runs, catches, throws – wins. Business is no different. Master the basics well and success will follow.

In a baseball game, the team that best executes the fundamentals of the game – hits, runs, catches, throws – wins.

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

Children also assume that girls always play with makeup and tea sets and boys always collect baseball cards and play with fire trucks, even if the girls and boys were never exposed to these things. A cow can’t do pig things, just like a girl can’t do boy things and a boy can’t do girl things. Children, based on the findings in this study, assume that girls are born with innate and unchangeable characteristics that fundamentally differ from the innate and unchangeable characteristics that boys are born with. No amount of exposure or teaching can change our traits and interests. In other words, boys and girls are as different as cows and pigs. This is an important study because it points out how rigid children’s thinking is when it comes to gender differences. It is similar to the old saying “Give him an inch and he will take a mile.” Give kids a little push toward focusing on gender differences (and, in fact, we are giving them a massive push with our constant use of gender), and they will run with it—making us entirely different species in the process.

Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.

FIELD OF DREAMS (novel Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella, screenplay by Phil Alden Robinson, 1989) Field of Dreams is an American version of The Cherry Orchard in which the “orchard” wins. The competition in this story is over the value of the farmland that Ray has turned into a baseball diamond. • Ray: Baseball, family, passion for your dreams • Mark: Money, practical use of the land With characters as variations on a theme and opposition of values, you may want to use the technique of four-corner opposition, explained in Chapter 4. In four-corner opposition, you have a hero and a main opponent and at least two secondary opponents. This gives even the most complex story an organic unity. Each of the four main characters can represent a fundamentally different approach to the same moral problem, and each can express an entire system of values, without the story collapsing into a complicated mess.