Top 33 Thomas Boswell Quotes

#1. Some things cannont possibly happen, because they are both too improbable and too perfect. The U.S. hockey team cannot beat the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. Jack Nicklaus cannot shoot 65 to win the Masters at age forty-six. Nothing else comes immediately to mind.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #115207
#2. Decades after a person has stopped collecting bubble gum cards, he can still discover himself collecting ballparks ... their smells, their special seasons, their moods.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #126161
#3. A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #133172
#4. Baseball is really two sports
the summer game and the autumn game. One is the leisurely pastime of our national mythology. The other is not so gentle.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #148509
#5. Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #333828
#6. What most people want to keep under wraps (from reporters) is trivial: petty jealousies, professional feuds, etc. By contrast, most of the things they have thought about most seriously all their lives they are perfectly winning to uncover.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #353034
#7. [B]aseball is diffracted by the town and ballpark where it is played ... Does baseball, like a liquid, take the shape of its container?

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #376674
#8. Baseball is religion without the mischief.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #406970
#9. As every golfer knows, no one ever lost his mind over one shot. It is rather the gradual process of shot after shot watching your score go to tatters - knowing that you have found a different way to bogey each hole.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #456935
#10. Cheating is baseball's oldest profession. No other game is so rich in skullduggery, so suited to it or so proud of it.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #477166
#11. Boswell is the first of biographers.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Thomas Boswell Quotes #507926
#12. Conversation is the blood of baseball. It flows through the game, an invigorating system of anecdotes. Ballplayers are tale tellers who have polished their malarkey and winnowed their wisdom for years.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #519202
#13. Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #668708
#14. Familiarity, and a few dozen cheap flyballs off the Monster, breed contempt.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #676175
#15. Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #725136
#16. Any person claiming to be a baseball fan who does not also claim to have invented the quickest, simplest and most complete method of keeping score probably is a fraud.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #741596
#17. A major golf tournament is 40,000 sadists watching 144 masochists.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #802388
#18. There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #817177
#19. Of the big four, the PGA is the most fair and the least fun. Basically, it's just the US Open set up by nice, rather than nasty, fellows.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #933389
#20. Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger. Moderation seldom finds a place. Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1003946
#21. An almost inexorable baseball law: A Red Sox ship with a single leak will always find a way to sink No team is worshipped with such a perverse sense of fatality.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1081578
#22. More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1092009
#23. Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech - a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1268935
#24. The naked pinch hitter takes only one thing to the plate: his raw, and somewhat irrational, confidence in himself. That this confidence is so unreasonable adds to its dignity.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1381520
#25. I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter, if you don't count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1387010
#26. Baseball is not necessarily an obsessive-compulsive disorder, like washing your hands 100 times a day, but it's beginning to seem that way. We're reaching the point where you can be a truly dedicated, state-of-the-art fan or you can have a life. Take your pick.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1390590
#27. The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1558885
#28. Bruce Sutter and his new pitch, the split finger fastball, fascinate the manager of the Cuban national teams. 'We must find out about this new weapon,' he said. 'Are the American hitters plotting to murder him?

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1560711
#29. The best place to catch a baseball hit by (Mark) McGwire is definitely not within the confines of the playing field, or sometimes even the ballpark. Other players dial '1' for long distance. McGwire has to ask for an international operator.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1571441
#30. A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1618538
#31. All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1677435
#32. Almost without exception, they are men who dreamed of athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1746976
#33. Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to quiet down. Pitchers never do.

Thomas Boswell

Thomas Boswell Quotes #1877383

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