60 Baseball Quotes to Inspire & Motivate Aspiring Players

Here are the top 60 baseball quotes to teach you more about the sport and how you can win, both in the game and in life!

Though football has slowly overtaken baseball in terms of popularity and viewership rating, historically, baseball will always be America’s national sport. It’s a pastime that has brought millions of people together, regardless of age, status, and color.

Many say baseball is much more boring than action-packed games like football, basketball, and others. But, as Red Barber said, “Baseball is dull only to dull minds.”

Every game involves a lot of strategizing, planning, and teamwork. Baseball, in many ways, teaches its players and fans the value of working hard and standing up after a failure.

So, if you’re a fan of the sport or an aspiring player, you’ll benefit from this list of the best baseball quotes. Read on and find the inspiration and motivation you need to be the best you can be!

Best Baseball Quotes

1. “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed 3 times out of 10 and be considered a good performer.” – Ted Williams

2. “Baseball is dull only to dull minds.” – Red Barber

3. “Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind you and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.” – Bullet Bob Feller

4. “Baseball is 90% mental, and the other half is physical.” – Yogi Berra

5. “Baseball is, was, and always will be the best game in the world to me.” – Babe Ruth

6. “Baseball is like driving; it’s the one who gets home safely that counts.” – Tommy Lasorda

7. “Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand.” – Leo Ernest Durocher

8. “That’s the beautiful thing about baseball. You can be any size and be successful.” – Andrew Benintendi

9. “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game—it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.” – James Earl Jones

Famous Baseball Quotes

10. “Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” – Babe Ruth

11. “Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.” – Yogi Berra

12. “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” – Babe Ruth

13. “Baseball ain’t like football. You can’t make up no trick plays.” – Yogi Berra

14. “Baseball is more than a game to me; it’s a religion.” – William Klem

15. “Baseball is a good thing. Always was, always will be.” – Stephen King

Baseball Quotes for Your Inspiration

16. “There are three types of baseball players: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened.” – Tommy Lasorda

17. “You never know what’s going to happen. And that’s the fun of it! That’s what baseball’s all about!” – Keiichi Arawi

18. “You may not think you’re going to make it. You may want to quit. But if you keep your eye on the ball, you can accomplish anything.” – Hank Aaron

19. “It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth, you can always pull out a miracle.” – Bill Vaughn

20. “A man has to have goals—or a day, for a lifetime—and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.’” – Ted Willams

21. “In playing ball, and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.” – Hank Aaron

22. “You can’t be afraid to make errors! You can’t be afraid to be naked before the crowd, because no one can ever master the game of baseball, or conquer it.” – Lou Brock

23. “If you’re not practicing, somebody else is, somewhere, and he’ll be ready to take your job.” – Brooks Robinson

24. “I do what I’ve trained my whole life to do. I watch the ball. I keep my eye on the ball. I never stop watching. I watch it as it sails past me and lands in the catcher’s mitt, a perfect and glorious strike three.” – Barry Lyga

Motivational Baseball Quotes to Fire You Up

25. “If my uniform doesn’t get dirty, I haven’t done anything in the baseball game.” – Rickey Henderson

26. “A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” – Jim Bouton

27. “With baseball, it’s simple. There’s no mystery to what happens on the field because everything has a label—full count, earned run, perfect game—and there’s a certain amount of comfort in this terminology. There’s no room for confusion.” – Jennifer E. Smith

28. “Nobody wanted me. Scouts told me to go to school, to forget baseball. Coaches said, ‘You’re never going to make it.’ I appreciated their honesty because I think when someone tells you something you may not like, you have to use that as fuel for motivation.” – Mike Piazza

29. “Baseball is a sport of failure. The most successful batters fail 70% of the time, and the most successful teams have to endure 60 losses or more each season. To succeed in baseball, you must learn not how to avoid failure, but how to quickly bounce back from it—with optimism and perseverance.” – Darrin Donnelly

30. “How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball. The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I’ve got—I hit big, or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.” – Babe Ruth

31. “Baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric—not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready.” – Chad Harbach

32. “The next time someone whines that baseball doesn’t have enough action, you can do two things: first, explain the planning, strategizing, calculating, and deception that place before every pitch. Then quote Hall-of-Fame announcer Red Barber, ‘Baseball is dull only to dull minds.’” – Zack Hample

33. “I could have played baseball another year, but I would have been playing for the money, and baseball deserves better than that.” – George Brett

Baseball Quotes About Life

34. “Life is like a baseball game. When you think a fastball is coming, you gotta be ready to hit the curve.” – Jaja Q.

35. “Baseball is a lot like life. It’s a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life.” – Ernie Harwell

36. “Worrying about things you can’t control is a waste both on the baseball field and in life.” – Tom Swyers

37. “To succeed in baseball, as in life, you must make adjustments.” – Ken Griffey Jr.

38. “You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possibly be—in baseball and in life.” – Pete Rose

39. “Baseball isn’t just a game. It’s life being played out on a field—a field of dreams—on diamonds of green, where players pursuing their dreams try to be the best they can be on the grandest stage of all—where men become boys and boys become men, all speaking one universal language without uttering a single word.” – Tom Tatum

Baseball Quotes and Sayings That You Must Keep In Your Heart

40. “The other sports are just sports. Baseball is a love.” – Bryant Gumbel

41. “Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.” – Jackie Robinson

42. “If the people don’t wanna come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop ’em.” – Yogi Berra

43. “When you start the game, they don’t say, ‘Work Ball!’ They say, ‘Play ball!’” – Willie Stargell

44. “I really love the togetherness in baseball. That’s real true love.” – Billy Martin

45. “Close doesn’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades.” – Frank Robinson

46. “Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal.” – Pete Rose

47. “Baseball gives a growing boy self-poise and self-reliance. Baseball is a man-maker.” – Albert Goodwill Spalding

48. “Deep down, it’s all baseball, no matter what kind of geometrical shape you play it with.” – Vernon D. Burns

49. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” – Jacques Barzun

50. “They give you a round bat, and they throw you a round ball, and then they tell you to hit it square.” – Willie Stargell

Baseball Quotes to Learn More About the Sport

51. “Baseball is not life. It is fiction—a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.” – David James Duncan

52. “Baseball is such a tough game. It really humbles you at times; you just have to try not to get too high or too low.” – Chase Utley

53. “Baseball is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with the increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action.” – John Irving

54. “It is dangerous to spring to obvious conclusions about baseball or, for that matter, ball players. Baseball is not an obvious game.” – Roger Kahn

55. “Baseball is not a sport you can achieve individually.” – Curt Schilling

56. “Baseball really is a glorified game of throw and catch. And if you don’t have guys who throw it really well, you can’t compete for long.” – Tucker Elliot

57. “More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.” – Thomas Boswell

More Baseball Quotes From Movies for Your Instagram Captions

58. “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game—the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us all.” – Bull Durham

59. “Man, this is baseball. You gotta stop thinking, just have fun.” – The Sandlot

60. “There’s no crying in baseball!” – A League of Their Own

Who’s Your Favorite Baseball Player Ever?

Baseball’s Hall of Fame is packed with many players who have contributed a lot to the sport and the lives of its fans. They are from different teams and places and even vary in age.

However, no matter their differences, they all have some things in common that helped them earn their spot in baseball’s history. Each player has grit, perseverance, and an endless desire to get their team to the top.

They all understand the value of teamwork and how none of the above values would work as effectively without it. Moreover, these people all encountered countless defeats and injuries before they became the greatest baseball players.

So, if you’re like them and you have a goal you want to reach, know that you’d first face obstacles on your way to success. You must have the grit and perseverance to overcome them and the failures that will inevitably come.

Aside from that, you must also know when and how to seek help from your family and friends. Remember, knowing that you can lean on others for support and encouragement will help you power through anything.

Baseball is a sport that’s a lot like life. Remember the lessons you’ve learned from the quotes above, as they will help you triumph over every challenge that awaits!

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Karen Danao

Hi, I’m Karen, a content curator and writer for Quote Ambition; I’m also a marketing and advertising professional. Beyond the keyboard and the screen, I’m someone who’s out to enjoy every bit that life has to offer!

Poetry, philosophy, history, and movies are all topics I love writing about! However, my true passion is in traveling, photography, and finding common ground to which everyone from different cultures can relate.

With the many places I’ve been to, I found that love, inspiration, and happiness are some things that bring people together. No matter how different we are on the outside, I’m a true believer that our emotions don’t lie; if you dig deep into our psyche, we’re all the same inside.

This belief was further amplified when I joined Quote Ambition. Through the quotes I’ve read, collected, organized, and written about, I found that humans are resilient, creative, and compassionate.

We take from each others’ hearts and courage, and it’s through our individual experiences that we learn how to rise above our challenges and pain. In so many ways, Quote Ambition is a platform that allows people from all over the world to gain the inspiration they need anytime, anywhere!

You can find me on MuckRack and LinkedIn.