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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Baseball Fan's delight, March 31, 2000
This is a keeper for any baseball fan. The most complete, enjoyable collection of baseball quotes I've ever seen...from the humerous to the serious. And the size makes it easy to handle.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless Words of Wit & Wisdom, June 14, 2009
Louis D. Rubin, Jr. put together a wonderful collection of quotes from every spectrum of the baseball world; and from every generation. Some of the observations made over one hundred years ago are still relevent, demonstrating the timeless beauty of the greatest game on earth.
Any fan of the game who appreciates its rich history, will cherish having this book in their personal library. You'll especially get a kick out of some of Casey Stengel's rambling diatribes, although you might need a translator to comprehend "Stengelese". It's a complex language, but it's fun to try to understand.
On the other side of the spectrum are quotes from some of the game's greatest players, made over one hundred years ago; and the voice of the great Christy Mathewson, one of the game's true gentlemen, will resonate with grace and poignance, even after all these years.
In short, this treasure chest of quotations is an invaluable resource to have in your possession. It will enrich your life.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Brevity should be the soul of baseball wit., March 12, 2005
Athletics, in general, and baseball, in particular, are strange animals. It's not often that the learned have any real fascination with or adoration for the unlearned, but athletics are the exception to the rule.
Virtually every athlete's autobiography is ghost-written. And those who observe athletics and communicate about what they observe are often blessed or cursed with a formal education - think of Roger Angell, Bartlett Giamatti, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Yet the athletes themselves are generally not Rhodes scholars, even though they are more likely to have a formal education now than in previous years - and even though they have ALWAYS been likely to have an instinctive brand of intelligence that isn't necessarily honed by formal education.
Roy Blount makes this point in what is otherwise a somewhat addled introduction to this collection of baseball quotations, edited by Louis Rubin. The collection itself has a quotation in it making the point that the average baseball player knows far more about his profession than does the smartest sportswriter.
Yogi Berra's oft-quoted observation that it was impossible to think and hit at the same time is a perfect example of that instinctive brand of intelligence. When Joe Louis said of Billy Conn, "He can run, but he can't hide", he was imparting more wisdom than you could ever hope to receive in a dozen treatises from Leonard Koppett.
And there's a wonderful story in this collection in which an earnest sportswriter asks Leo Durocher if he's going to try to get his team off to a fast start when the season begins. "No, you stupid ---!" Durocher replies. "I'm gonna lose the first ten games!"
So no book of baseball quotations can be all bad, and there are other good ones in here, but in spite of all the warning signs, Rubin often does err on the side of the intellectualoids, giving us a little too much of their frothy eloquence and not quite enough of the ballplayers' peasant wisdom.
A collection that includes six George Will quotations is a collection overburdened by at least six quotations, though it IS gratifying to be reminded of the misery that the Chicago Cubs have put Will through.
Fred Leib provides a little too much background to Casey Stengel's superimposing himself over the Yankee front office's cover story that he had retired with the flat declaration, "Boys, I've just been fired". It might have been better to just include the quotation itself, which stands on its own (with perhaps a brief explanation in italics below an attribution to Leib`s book).
Stengel himself was capable of rambling as well, and this collection includes some lengthy Stengelese diatribe. But I would have also elected to include Casey's forthright and brief answer to why he ordered slow-footed weak-hitting pitcher Bob Turley to (successfully) attempt to execute the hit-and-run instead of bunting: "Because it's run, sheep, run, and you can't bunt the lively ball".
A pink cloud threatens baseball today. Baseball is a game of uniquely masculine imagery and ritual and as in every other field known for its masculine mystery today, it is being encroached upon by the female menace.
In addition to the infestation of the game with female sportswriters, the Giants have been cursed for years with a female public address announcer, and the Yankees have recently hired a female color commentator. Female encroachment upon any pastime inevitably deprives it of all mystique, and it's more of a threat to baseball than all of the gambling scandals, big money, drug scandals, and steroids controversies put together.
For this reason, I am grateful to Rubin for including quotations from a couple of old-time baseball men, Rogers Hornsby and John McGraw (discussing the subject of players wives), about a woman's proper role in the game.
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