Roger Kahn Quotes

One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all.

Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?"

Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.

What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game.

It was a fine thing to be a newspaperman and I very much wanted to be a good one.

The time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done.

No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.

One thing a writer has, if he is fortunate, and I have been fortunate, is a partnership with the years.

I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?

There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.

Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.

The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do.

One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brooklyn Dodgers was the excitement of their play.

In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.

Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves.