“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.”
Source: Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992), Chapter 2, Baseballs Barons, p. 30.
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Andrew Zimbalist 17
American economist 1947Related quotes

Speech to the press (3 December 1980), quoted in The Times (4 December 1980), p. 5
Member of the European Parliament
Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 9

“I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!"”
He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."
Conversation with Whitman (4 July 1889) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. IV

“The only real game — I think — in the world is baseball.”
Farewell Address (1947)

Source: Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997), p. 252