Thomas Boswell Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

Thomas Boswell
Baseball means Spring's Here. Football means Winter's Coming.

Thomas Boswell
Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to quiet down. Pitchers never do.

Thomas Boswell
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
Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

Thomas Boswell
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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