Andrew Zimbalist

Quotes

1. Baseball's owners must be the only U.S. citizens whose parents never told them the story of the boy who cried wolf. Their perennial cry of evaporating profits and imminent catastrophe in the presence of rapidly growing revenues and escalating franchise values is hard to take seriously.

   p. 47

2. 

   How is it that the average CEO in Japan receives an annual income of $300,000 while the average CEO in the United States earns $2.8 million?

   p. 78

3. 

   It is well to recall that in 112 years of major league baseball, there has been only one bankruptcy filing.

   p. 72

4. 

   Between 1903 and 1991 the value of the Yankees appreciated at a compound annual rate of 11.4 percent.

   p. 68

5. 

   Some owners are competent, effective business people who care about the game. Many others do not share these attributes.

   p. 186

6. 

   Baseballs exemption from antitrust statutes, based on the notion that it was not involved in interstate commerce, erroneous back in 1922 and more so in the 1950s, became even more anomalous in 1957, when the Supreme Court declared football to be subject to the antitrust statutes and stated that baseball's exemption was "unreasonable, illogical and inconsistent."

   p. 15

7. 

   With today's high salaries, long term contracts, and corporate penetration of the ownership ranks, it is commonplace to hear commentators rue baseball's growing commercialization, claiming it is undermining the aesthetics and competitive spirit of the game. In fact baseball's growing commercialism has been a constant since the 1860s.

   p. 30

8. 

   While Babe Ruth's $80,000 in 1930 was eighty times the average U.S. income, Don Mattingly's $3.4 million in 1991 was 160 times the average.

   p. 77

9. 

   The first baseball game ever televised was a battle for fourth place in the Ivy League between Columbia and Princeton on May 17, 1939.

   p. 149

10. 

    Baseball performance is an outcome of opposing forces.

    p. 142

11. 

    The activity of rooting for baseball and other sports teams is one of the strongest expressions of community remaining in our society.

    p. 186

12. 

    Nobody ever said that capitalism guarantees profit.

    p. 69