57 Quotes by John Thorn

The heroes of our youth grow old – ‘the boys of summer in their ruin,’ in Dylan Thomas’s verse – yet we seem the same.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one’s home and family.

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.

If I haven’t made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

Just because I am increasingly bored by sabermetric arcana doesn’t mean anyone else has to be; it remains good for people who like that sort of thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.’