John Thorn Quotes

• 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

• 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

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

  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

• 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

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

  John Thorn

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

  John Thorn

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

  John Thorn

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

  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 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community’s armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

  John Thorn

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

  John Thorn

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

  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

John Thorn (34)

Birth:	17th April, 1947
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Historian, Publisher

About

John Thorn was born in Stuttgart, Germany. He is an American sports historian, author and publisher. He graduated from Beloit College in 1968. Since March 1, 2011, he has been the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball. He served as the senior creative consultant for the 1994 Ken Burns documentary Baseball. He founded Total Sports Publishing and served as its publisher from 1998-2002. In 2006, the Society for American Baseball Research bestowed on Thorn its highest accolade, the Bob Davids Award. He has written several books include: The Hidden Game of Baseball (with Pete Palmer), The Pitcher (with John Holway), Total Baseball (with Pete Palmer), A Life in the Shadows (with Hy Peskin), Baseball in the Garden of Eden, and The Hidden Game of Football (with Bob Carroll and Pete Palmer).

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Today's Anniversary - 21st November

Births

• 1963 - Nicollette Sheridan
• 1943 - Philip Norman Bredesen Jr.
• 1989 - Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte
• 1870 - Alexander Berkman
• 1958 - Rickson Gracie

Deaths

• 1999 - Quentin Crisp
• 1922 - Ricardo Flores Magon
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1996 - Mohammad Abdus Salam