Games Have Started!...and Manny

I'll keep this one short, since I have to go to class in five minutes:

So games have started. That is incredible. Despite not watching them, I can feel the excitement coursing through my veins. Real baseball is inching closer and closer an I could not be more excited.

Jorge, Brett, and A-Rod have all hit homers. Do they matter? Not at all. Do I care that they don't matter? No, I don't. It's always encouraging to see guys hitting well in baseball.

Then there's Manny. He rejected the Dodgers latest offer. Ugh. I don't know what he and Boras think they're going to get but...it's not out there. But, that doesn't mean the Dodgers should just stop trying. I mean let's be honest here, they're probably pissed off at Manny. But at the same time, do they really want to go into '09 penciling in "Juan Pierre" in the lineup card instead of "Manny Ramirez"?

Anyway, I'll leave you with some of my favorite baseball themed quotes:

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us. ~Walt Whitman


With those who don't give a damn about baseball, I can only sympathize. I do not resent them. I am even willing to concede that many of them are physically clean, good to their mothers and in favor of world peace. But while the game is on, I can't think of anything to say to them. ~Art Hill

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. ~A. Bartlett Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem. ~Saul Steinberg

and my favorites:

"Baseball? It's just a game. As simple as a ball and a bat, yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, a business, and sometimes even a religion." --Ernie Harwell

"The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers, it's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the times. This field, the game is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that was once good...and could be again." --"Field of Dreams."

Play ball, boys. Play ball.

Play ball, boys. Play ball.