"Ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection."
"My best girl is dead."
Source: Red Smith (2013). “American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (The Library of America)”, p.325, Library of America
About the author
Red Smith
Sportswriter
Red Smith was a renowned sports columnist whose insightful writing transformed sports journalism, emphasizing the emotional narratives behind the games.
All quotes by Red Smith →Same author
More quotes by Red Smith
"Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop."
"It is well known that the older a man grows, the faster he could run as a boy."
"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention."
"I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them."
"As a ballplayer, (Dizzy) Dean was a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Nobody ever taught him baseball and he never had to learn. He was just doing what came naturally when a scout named Don Curtis discovered him on a Texas sandlot and gave him his first contract."