And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'
- John Thorn Quote
Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.
- John Thorn Quote
But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.
- John Thorn Quote
But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.
- John Thorn Quote
Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.
- John Thorn Quote
Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?
- John Thorn Quote
Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.
- John Thorn Quote
Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things.
- John Thorn Quote
For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.
- John Thorn Quote
I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.
- John Thorn Quote
If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.
- John Thorn Quote
In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.
- John Thorn Quote
More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself.
- John Thorn Quote
My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.
- John Thorn Quote
Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.
- John Thorn Quote
Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
- John Thorn Quote
The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor.
- John Thorn Quote
There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.
- John Thorn Quote
This illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.
- John Thorn Quote
This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.
- John Thorn Quote
We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.
- John Thorn Quote
Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.
- John Thorn Quote
Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.
- John Thorn Quote
