John Thorn quotes

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green. (John Thorn)
This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family. View quote
John Thorn
The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work. View quote
John Thorn
Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off. View quote
John Thorn
But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys. View quote
John Thorn
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)
Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come. View quote
John Thorn
Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
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. View quote
John Thorn
In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way. View quote
John Thorn
Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail. View quote
John Thorn