John Thorn Quotes

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?

  John Thorn

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

  John Thorn

• But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys.

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Award trophies, as opposed to letting the players define and claim their own. Ultimately, pay them to play so that their activity not only resembles work but is work.

  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

• 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

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 - 10th April

Births

• 1930 - Dolores Huerta
• 1827 - Lew Wallace
• 1981 - Michael Pitt
• 1952 - Steven Seagal
• 1932 - Omar Sharif

Deaths

• 2004 - Ben Pimlott
• 1876 - Alexander Turney Stewart
• 1992 - Sam Kinison
• 1966 - Evelyn Waugh
• 1955 - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin