“Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”

This is possibly the best movie quote of all time. It’s definitely top five. When Terrance Mann waxes poetic about what baseball means to us as a country, it gives me chills, because I don’t think it could be said better. Baseball is an american institution. As time marches on, baseball stays the same. The same 60 feet and six inches from the mound to the plate. The same 90 feet from the plate to first. And the same feeling each spring in our heads and our hearts, as the boys of summer take to the field, reviving memories from our childhoods, as well as reminding us what it was like to play a game for the love of it. For the purity of it. I have baseball fever again.