"Let him hit it, you've got fielders behind you."
--Alexander Cartwright, attributed by Bob Chieger in Voices of Baseball

"I don't really like to run, and that's why I didn't go out for track in high school. I ain't no fool, I see those dudes running around a track for a living. I wouldn't want to run against them. I wouldn't want to embarrass myself."
--Willie Wilson

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When asked what he did in the winter when there is no baseball, Rogers Hornsby famously replied that he would "stare out the window and wait for spring." Fortunately, these days fans of the game have plenty to keep them occupied in the cold winter months. Not least amongst the off-season events is looking forward to the baseball-oriented Christmas loot that keeps us busy until spring. While not the massive haul of our Jay Jaffe, I'll keep warm with a new Cubs fleece from my lovely wife and keep occupied with Lee Lowenfish's hefty biography of Branch Rickey titled Branch Rickey: Baseball's Ferocious Gentleman and Cait Murphy's romp through the 1908 season Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History; both additions to my library courtesy of my in-laws.

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"Athletes who are chemically propelled to victory do not merely overvalue winning, they misunderstand why winning is properly valued."
George Will, "Barry Bonds' Enhancement," Newsweek, May 21, 2007

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"The subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest, and the maxim 'de minimis lex non curat'--the law is not concerned with trifles--does not apply to science."
--Charles Darwin, from the preface of his book The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits (1881)

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"Defense to me is the key to playing baseball."
--Willie Mays

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"Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases."
-Norman R. Augustine

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"Maybe being a minor league baseball player makes you insane. Maybe you just have to be crazy to be a minor league baseball player."
--Jim Bouton, from I'm Glad You Didn't Take it Personally

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"The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so."
--Blaise Pascal

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"This team, it all flows from me. I'm the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and [Thurman] Munson, but he can only stir it bad."
-Attributed to Reggie Jackson in the May 1977 issue of Sport magazine.

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"When you get right down to it, no corner of American culture is more precisely counted, more passionately quantified, than the performance of baseball players."
--Alan Schwarz, from the introduction to The Numbers Game

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"Never trust a baserunner who's limping. Comes a base hit, and you'll think he just got back from Lourdes."
--Joe Garagiola

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