"I think about the cosmic snowball theory. A few million years from now the sun will burn out and lose its gravitational pull. The earth will turn into a giant snowball and be hurled through space. When that happens it won't matter if I get this guy out." - Bill Lee
"The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime."
- Babe Ruth
"Sports do not build character. They reveal it." - Heywood Hale Broun
"A good professional athlete must have the love of a little boy. And the good players feel the kind of love for the game that they did when they were Little Leaguers." - Tom Seaver
"Swing hard, in case they throw the ball where you're swinging." - Duke Snider
Someone once described the pitching of a no-hit game as like catching lighting in a bottle.
- W. P. Kinsella
Progress always involves risks. You can't steal second base and keep your foot on first. - Frederick B. Wilcox
"One year I hit .291 and had to take a salary cut. If you hit .291 today, you'd own the franchise."
- Enos Slaughter
Before I was ever in my teens, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. My goal was to be the greatest athlete that ever lived. - Babe Didrikson Zaharias
"Baseball is beautiful....the supreme performing art. It combines in perfect harmony the magnificent features of ballet, drama, art, and ingenuity." - Commissioner Bowie Kuhn
"Baseball games are like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two are ever alike." - W. P. Kinsella
"What does a mama bear on the pill have in common with the World Series? No cubs.
"Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine. And that's really living.
"The pitcher has got only a ball. I've got a bat. So the percentage of weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.
Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction. - Robert Frost
No one can stop a home run. No one can understand what it really is, unless you have felt it in your own hands and body.... As the ball makes its high, long arc beyond the playing field, the diamond and the stands suddenly belong to one man. In that brief, brief time, you are free of all demands an complications. -Sadaharu Oh 
Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday's success or put its failures behind and start over again. That's the way life is, with a new game every day, and that's the way baseball is. -Bob Feller
When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing.... I told him I wanted to be a real Major League Baseball Player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's the true harbinger of spring, not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of a bat on the ball. -Bill Veeck, 1976 
Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. -Roger Angell
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.
- Babe Ruth 
Set your goals high, and don't stop till you get there. -Bo Jackson
My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging. - Hank Aaron
You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them.
Satchel Paige
Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you. -Satchel Paige
I believe in the Church of Baseball. I tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance. ~Ron Shelton, Bull Durham, 1988
It is well to remember that a Martian observing his first baseball game would be quite correct in concluding that the last two words of the National Anthem are: PLAY BALL! ~Herbert H. Paper, in Cincinnati Enquirer, 2 April 1989
Like those special afternoons in summer when you go to Yankee Stadium at two o'clock in the afternoon for an eight o'clock game. It's so big, so empty and so silent that you can almost hear the sounds that aren't there. ~Ray Miller
I don't love baseball. I don't love most of today's players. I don't love the owners. I do love, however, the baseball that is in the heads of baseball fans. I love the dreams of glory of 10-year-olds, the reminiscences of 70-year-olds. The greatest baseball arena is in our heads, what we bring to the games, to the telecasts, to reading newspaper reports. ~Stan Isaacs, "Diamond-Studded Memories," Newsday, 9 April 1990
Baseball? It's just a game - as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, business - and sometimes even religion. ~Ernie Harwell, "The Game for All America," 1955
More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood. ~Thomas Boswell, in Inside Sports
I don't know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts.... The triple is the most exciting play of the game. A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home. It drags on and on. You're never sure how it's going to turn out. ~George Foster, 1978
This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings. ~Bill Veeck
A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can, and does, devour any set of diamond statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more. ~Arthur Daley
The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays. ~Lawrence Ritter
I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice. ~Casey Stengel, 1967
During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. ~Mickey Mantle, 1970
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. ~A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977
I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. ~Walt Whitman
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. ~Jim Murray
What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagement of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability. ~George Bernard Shaw
Baseball, to me, is still the national pastime because it is a summer game. I feel that almost all Americans are summer people, that summer is what they think of when they think of their childhood. I think it stirs up an incredible emotion within people. ~Steve Busby, in Washington Post, 8 July 1974
There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit. ~Al Gallagher, 1971
People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. ~Rogers Hornsby
You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time. ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four, 1970
“It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.” Hank Aaron.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.
Field of Dreams
Terence Mann:
(James Earl Jones) 
“Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game” -Edward Abbey
“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 give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.” Earl Weaver