Eddie Mathews Quotes

Basketball is a game. Baseball is a religion. Baseball is American.

It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch, and then dashing off to play stickball in the street with his teenage pals. That's baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, 'I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.'

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.

You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you've been a boy, and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime.

Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

Obviously, I'm a shortstop at heart. I want to continue to play shortstop.

You have to remember that baseball really was the American pastime in the Forties, not football, basketball or any other sport.

The new definition of a heathen is a man who has never played baseball.

Baseball is very big at the present time. This makes me think baseball will live longer than Casey Stengel or anybody else.

Baseball is our national game.

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field.

I love to play this game of baseball. I love putting on the uniform.

The game of baseball is a clean, straight game, and it summons to its presence everybody who enjoys clean, straight athletics. It furnishes amusement to the thousands and thousands.

Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all of the professional patriots with all their cheap words.

Baseball is a boy's game that makes grown men cry.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.

Baseball is a game of life. It's not perfect, but it feels like it is.

Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?

Baseball has a special place in our hearts. It is the game that shows us as we would like to be.

Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.

That's the game of baseball - amazing things happen.