One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.
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

Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
John Thorn

The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.
John Thorn

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.
John Thorn

The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor.
John Thorn

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.
John Thorn

This illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.
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

We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different from residents of other towns, other states, other regions.
John Thorn

We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments.
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

Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.
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, market forces will prevail.
John Thorn