If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Keep score, which is what the Talmud recognizes as a distinction between work and play that renders a game unfit for the… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team.… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true;… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century. — John Thorn Copy Share Image
My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time… — John Thorn Copy Share Image
