Quotes by John Thorn

About John Thorn:

John Thorn is a sports historian, author, and cultural commentator. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. He lives in Saugerties, New York
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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.

John Thorn

For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.

John Thorn

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

John Thorn

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

More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself...

John Thorn

Whatever else I do before finally I go to my grave, I hope it will not be looking after young people.

John Thorn

Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year.

John Thorn

For many in baseball September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning.

John Thorn

In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way.

John Thorn

I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.

John Thorn

Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.

John Thorn

But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world.

John Thorn

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, marke...

John Thorn

Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off.

John Thorn

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.

John Thorn

As the game enters its glorious final weeks, the chill of fall signals the reality of defeat for all but one team. The fields of play will turn brown and harden, the snow will fall, but in the heart of the fan sprouts a sprig of green.

John Thorn

But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.

John Thorn

Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.

John Thorn

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 things.

John Thorn

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

John Thorn

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Thorn
  • DescriptionAmerican baseball writer and editor
  • BornApril 17, 1947
  • ProfessionAuthor