George Will Quotes

"All I remember about my wedding day in 1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header." Source: USA Weekend (04/01/1990)

"America overflows with specious 'victims' demanding redress for spurious grievances. However, one genuinely oppressed minority is getting overdue relief. Beginning with spring training in Arizona and Florida, Major League Baseball, taking pity on traumatized pitchers, is directing umpires to enforce the strike zone as defined in the rulebook. What a concept." Source: Baseball umpires may actually follow the rules (Townhall.com, 04/01/2001)

"An alloy of innocence and arrogance, young (Ted) Williams came to Boston when it had four morning and four evening local newspapers engaged in perpetual circulation wars. He became grist for their mills, and his wars with the sportswriters brought out the worst in him, and cost him. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards and finished second four times. Several of those times he would have won had he not had such poisonous relations with the voting press." Source: Remembering Ted Williams (Townhall.com, 07/08/2002)

"Baseball is a habit. The slowly rising crescendo of each game, the rhythm of the long season--these are the essentials and they are remarkably unchanged over nearly a century and a half. Of how many American institutions can that be said?" Source: Bunts (George Will, 1999)

"Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals." Source: Bunts (George Will, 1999)

"Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal." Source: Widely Attributed

"Baseball's best teams lose about sixty-five times a season. It is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched." Source: Washington Post Book World (11/29/1987)

"(Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book — serious fans — will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry." Source: Barry "Asterisk" Bonds (Townhall.com, 05/12/2006)

"Conservatives are forever being lectured that 'you can't turn the clock back' — and shouldn't want to. Oh? This season, for the first time since the Astrodome opened in 1965, every National League game will be played on real grass. What a concept. There are many other reasons why this is baseball's Golden Age, but, in the words of former Phillies manager Larry Bowa, 'I don't want to beat a dead horse in the mouth.'" Source: The Old Ballgame Still Has Its Grip (WashingtonPost.com, 04/04/2005)

"Correct thinkers think that 'baseball trivia' is an oxymoron: nothing about baseball is trivial." Source: Syndicated Column (04/08/1990)

"In a nation committed to better living through chemistry — where Viagra-enabled men pursue silicone-contoured women — the national pastime has a problem of illicit chemical enhancement. Steroids threaten the health of the 5 percent to 7 percent of players proved, by a mild regime of scheduled tests, to be using them. Steroids also endanger emulative young people. Further, steroids subvert what baseball is selling — fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history." Source: The state of baseball on opening day (Townhall.com, 04/04/2004)

"It (baseball) has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression." Source: Widely Attributed

"Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners — principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues." Source: Baseball's paradox (Townhall.com, 08/10/2002)

"Night baseball isn't an aberration. What's an aberration is a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908. They tend to think of themselves as a little Williamsburg, a cute little replica of a major league franchise. Give me the Oakland A's, thank you very much. People who do it right." Source: USA Today (04/27/1990)

"(Pete) Rose's coming clean is the most soiled conversion of convenience since ... well, Aug. 17, 1998, when DNA evidence caused Bill Clinton to undergo a memory clarification. On the diamond, no one ever wrung more success from less natural talent than Rose did. But his second autobiography — which refutes the first — makes worse the mess he has made." Source: Just say no to Pete Rose (Townhall.com, 01/07/2004)

"There is no written rule, but it is part of baseball's rich common law that batters shall not glance back to see where the catcher is setting up because that reveals the intended pitch location. A catcher may give a peeking batter a polite warning. If the batter is a recidivist, the catcher then may set up outside but call for a pitch inside. When the batter leans out toward where he thinks the pitch is going, his ribs receive a lesson about respecting the common law. Sport is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things--courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship. Sport should be the triumph of character, openly tested, not of technology, surreptitiously employed." Source: Say it ain't so (Townhall.com, 02/08/2001)

Amazon.com (Book Review)

"Bunts," explains peripatetic political commentator and baseball rhapsodist George Will, "are modest and often useful things." So is his latest, fittingly titled foray into the National Pastime. Unlike his splendid Men at Work, which offered long, detailed exegeses on the way Tony Gwynn, Orel Hershiser, Cal Ripken, Jr., and Tony La Russa sweat the details of mastering specific aspects of the game, Bunts is a less unified, but wider ranging collection of Will's shorter baseball journalism--columns, essays, and book reviews--assembled chronologically from 1974 through the 1997 season. Each piece may be brief, but taken individually or as a whole, the collection is certainly useful, and like a good outfielder, it covers plenty of territory.

Will, to be sure, is an elegant writer, a little verbose at times, but dependably knowledgeable, stirringly erudite, thoughtfully opinionated, and, here and there, delightfully personal--as in the volume's leadoff hitter in which he traces his own conservative principles to growing up a Cub fan. His lineup continues with a breezy ode to Louisville Sluggers; encomiums to Casey Stengel, Camden Yards, Ripken, Gwynn, and Curt Flood; a startling about-face on the DH; an early homage to statsmeister Bill James; and indictments on the selfishness of Ted Williams, the callousness of the owners in labor- and fan-relations, and the sordid personalities of Pete Rose and Billy Martin. The volume ends with a pair of doubles in the form of larger essays on Jon Miller and the distinctive craft of broadcasting, and a concluding one on the state of the game.

George Will Goes Deep (The Harvard Salient, April 15, 1999)

It's a beautiful day in late March, and everything that makes Florida great is in evidence. Tourists, some brazenly donning the ears of their favorite rodent. Enough old people to stage an epic game of bingo.

And baseball. The not-so-promising Boston Red Sox are challenging the even more diminutive Pittsburgh Pirates in the Pirates' last home-away-from-home game of spring training. Thousands have come to Bradenton's McKechnie Field to see this less-than-epic clash of mediocrities. Then again, Bradentonians have watched the Pirates spring practices and games since 1969. In a climate with nearly indistinguishable seasons (winter + a few degrees and some humidity = summer), baseball's annual migration lends a comfortable, rolling periodicity to life.

George Will - columnist, baseball fan, and visiting lecturer at Harvard earlier this year - finds this daily and yearly repitition at the root of baseball, and at the foundation of its virtue. Will has written previously that "baseball's seasons, coming one after another and comprising a nearly seamless web, are deeply satisfying to one's sense of social transmission. It is the sense of society changing somewhat but always having as its primary business the passing along of slowly accumulated customs, mores, and techniques." He expands on this theme in his most recent collection of columns and short essays, Bunts.

Will ascribes to a classical conception of sport: a "religious and civic, in a word, a moral undertaking. Seeing people compete courageously helps emancipate the individual and educate his passions." Those under baseball's tutelage are especially blessed, as baseball's soothing repetition drills an especially valuable virtue.

Will writes of the "serious side of baseball": "the relentless and successful pursuit of excellence." Baseball becomes a "craft," a "vocation". Of course, vocations are based neither in luck - by Will "there is a direct correlation [within baseball] between the amount of luck you have and the amount of work you do" - nor on natural ability. In Men at Work, Will's first baseball book, he decries attribution of athletic success solely to God-given talent a "false and pernicious myth" because "for an athlete to fulfill his or her potential a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required." What matters, then, is passionate devotion to a task such that all of ones life is oriented towards success at that task. Thus, Will's moral imperative: "be as intelligent as you can be at whatever you are doing." In other words: "specialize."

Will admires those who immerse themselves in the game. He sketches Cal Ripken's streak of games without sitting out as indicative of the deep "reservoirs of America's everyday decency." Tony Gwynn is admirable because he succeeds through a scrupulous attention to detail; he knows that "he can contribute most to winning by doing what he does best, consistently." These, then are the twin poles of Will's baseball virtue: passionate devotion to excellence and consistency.

Will's heroes are quite unique. They are at once exemplars of virtue and specialists, both aristocrats and craftsmen, ancient and modern. In the most enjoyable exchange in Bunts, Will draws the ire of Yale Professor Donald Kagan for this apparent discrepancy. Kagan calls Will "democratically modern" insofar as Will identifies a virtue accessible to decidedly unheroic masses. Will replies pointedly: "I have been called many things, but rarely, if ever, democrat or modern. This mudslinging must cease."

Of course, no democrat would write that "baseball must not be a plaything of that turbulent, hydra-headed monster, the mob," and "democracy is fine in its place, but baseball, like religion, should be beyond the reach of majorities, not blown about by the whims of the unwashed." Will also argues that, in fact, his species of passionate devotion is quite rare, and thus may be considered a heroic virtue. "Not every major league player has the heroic willfulness to pull himself above the common major league herd of the merely gifted." However, Will's baseball virtue is democratic in one very important sense.

Unlike the brilliant heroism - replete with courage, suffering, and sacrifice - heralded by Kagan, Will's baseball virtue is both admirable and estimable. Martial daring is indeed praiseworhty, but for the commoner such courage is the stuff of fancy. Passionate, order-giving devotion to consistent excellence in a vocation, while rare in its finest vintage, is relevent to the droll everyday life of the unwashed. Will's baseball virtue, then, succeeds in fulfilling the classic role of sport: educating the passions of its spectators.

In Bradenton, thousands of eager pupils watched the Red Sox drub the Pirates to end their spring season. At the end of the game, it was all too evident that the season had waned again, and summer was fast approaching. Even the aforementioned tourists seemed dismayed. But for them the spring game was little more than a spectacle; for Bradentonians it was, and will continue to be, a ritual - a mark of passed time, and a valuable lesson in excellence. Indeed, a lesson in the peculiar virtue of baseball.

Hugh Liebert, Publisher