Baseball is not a conventional industry. It belongs neither to the players nor management, but to all of us. It is our national pastime, our national symbol, and our national treasure. — 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 by 'running the game like a business.' — 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
