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.
Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.
A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.
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.
Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.
For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.
Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process, where one rehearses constantly while acting, sits as a spectator at a play one directs, engages every part in order to keep the choices open and the shape alive for the student, so that the student may enter in, and begin to do what the teacher has done: make choices.
Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man’s or woman’s sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.
Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.
All play aspires to the condition of paradise…through play in all its forms…we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden…always as removed, as an enclosed green place…Paradise is an ancient dream…It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.
[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
No one man is superior to the game.
Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.
There are a lot of people who know me who can’t understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they’re here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
I’m not going to sit here now and say ‘do this,’ or ‘do that.’ But you must – must – expunge any vestige of racism.
The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.
Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.
To go from Yale to the National League is simply to go from one form of management to another.
It is not enough to offer a smorgasbord of courses. We must insure that students are not just eating at one end of the table.
The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is a sad end if a sorry episode. One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. There is absolutely no deal for reinstatement.
A tremendous social responsibility comes with being a successful public performer.
My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.
