Players
Rookies are in italics
 Antonin Artaud, Pitcher
1896-1948.
All writing is pigshit. People who leave the obscure and try to define whatever it is that goes in their heads, are pigs.
 Andre Breton, Firstbase
1896-1966
I liked and I still like-- yes, I love-- that poetry practiced in broad strokes which circles daily life with a halo of apprehensions and indices, floats around our impressions and actions.
 Miguel de Cervantes, Shortstop
1547-1616
And so, what could my sterile and ill-cultivated genius beget but the story of a lean, shriveled, whimsical child, full of varied fancies that no one else has ever imagined...
 Harry Crosby, Pitcher
1898-1929
Have begun to neglect work at the bank in order to study words in the dictionary (do you know what an aardvark is, or a xebec?) to write letters in order to acquire style (Pascal often re-cast letters twenty times before being satisfied with them) to read (whenever the opportunity offers)...
 Gustave Flaubert, Utility
1821-1880
Time was when his wife had doted on him. The slavishness of her adoration had but served to complete his estrangement from her. Once cheerful kind-hearted and wholly affectionate, she became, as she grew older (as wine left uncorked will turn into vinegar), morose, shrewish, and irritable.
 Ernest Hemingway, Rightfield
1899-1961
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
 Franz Kafka, Thirdbase
1883-1924
Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples were unpacked and spread out-- Samsa was a commercial traveler-- hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
 Ring Lardner, Centerfield
1885-1933
But I was goin' to tell you about Carey namin' him. We'd been workin' out two weeks and the pitchers was showin' somethin' when this bird joined us. His first day out he stood up there so good and took such a reef at the old pill that he had everyone lookin'. Then him and Carey was together in left field, catchin' fungoes, and it was after
we was through for the day that Carey told me about him.
 Sinclair Lewis, Catcher
1885-1951
That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out in the water. "I feel as if I were really beginning to work now, " said Martin. "This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We'll plug along on it for two or three years, and maybe we'll get something permanent-- and probably we'll fail!"
 Joyce Maynard, Outfield
b. 1953
Like overanxious patients in analysis, we treasure the traumas of our childhood. Ours was more traumatic than most. The Kennedy assassination has become our myth: Talk to us for an evening or two - about movies or summer jobs or Nixon's trip to China or the weather - and the subject will come up ("Where were you when you heard?"), as if having lived through Jackie and the red roses, John-John's salute and Oswald's on-camera murder justifies our disenchantment.
 Yukio Mishima, Leftfield
1925-1970
The world around him was quite as it had always been. Nothing had happened, and if he tried he could believe that nothing had happened even to him. A childish annoyance came over him. In an unknown place, an incident with which he had had nothing to do had cut him off from the world.
 Georges Perec, Secondbase
1936-1982
This is how space begins, with words only; signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?
 Edgar Allan Poe, Pitcher
1809-1849
Owing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.
 Rainer Maria Rilke, Pitcher
1875-1926
Who, if I cried, would hear me from the order/of Angels? And even if one suddenly held me/to his heart: I would dissolve there from/his stronger presence. For beauty is only/the beginning of a terror we can just barely endure,/and what we so admire is its calm/disdaining to destroy us. Every Angel brings terror.
 Delmore Schwartz, Pitcher
1913-1966
I am a book I neither wrote nor read,/A comic, tragic play in which new masquerades/Astonishing as guns crackle like raids/Newly each time, whatever one is prepared/To come upon, suddenly dismayed and afraid,/As in the dreams which make the fear of sleep/The terror of love, the depth one cannot leap.
 Nathanael West, Pitcher
1903-1940
It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.
 Virginia Woolf, Infield
1882-1941
She wanted to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force driving through her life arose from. She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind considers the result of being pressed downwards by the wind.
Staff
 Fielding Dawson, Field Manager
b. 1930
She opened it and leafed through the pages folding the book back until she threatened to break the spine, just able to realize that the alien object she held in her hands, which she was bending to breaking point, had been created by the alien man sitting next to her-- asking her not to ruin his book, causing her to look surprised-- she closed the book and put it on the cushion between us.
 William Makepeace Thackeray, Coach
1811-1863
Then came the struggle and parting below. Words refuse to tell it. All the servants were there in the hall--all the dear friend--all the young ladies--the dancing-master who had just arrived; and there was such a scuffling, and hugging, and kissing, and crying, with the hysterical YOOPS of Miss Swartz, the parlour-boarder, from her room, as no pen can depict, and as the tender heart would fain pass over.
 Henry Miller, General Manager
1891-1980
With me, it's mostly a matter of being tuned up or tuned in, of being in form mentally and spiritually. Writing, when it does come out, should come out like water from a faucet. The longer I keep this material in me, the more gemlike it becomes. It's the result of compression.
 Simone de Beauvoir, Owner
1808-1986
J'ai toujours voulu savoir tout: la philosophie me permettra d'apaisé cette Désir, car ça dirigeait a la réalité totale; la philosophie allait directement a la coeur du vérité et montrait a moi, au lieu d'un illusion de faits ou loi emprical, une ordre, une raison, un nécessité de tout
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