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Daily Inspiration Quote by Rachel Griffiths

"I think baseball - the baseball genre - is this mitt, to use a double pun there, to catch a whole bunch of themes"

About this Quote

Baseball, in Rachel Griffiths's hands, isn’t a sport so much as a container: a soft, well-worn object designed to receive whatever a story throws at it. The joke does real work. By calling baseball a "genre" and then pivoting to "mitt" with a self-aware "double pun", she’s winking at the way pop culture treats baseball less as an event than as a ready-made language. You don’t have to know the infield fly rule to understand what baseball signifies: nostalgia, masculinity, American mythology, family inheritance, failure endured over long seasons. A mitt is domestic. It lives in a closet or a car trunk, passed down, broken in, molded to a person. That’s already a narrative.

Her phrasing also reveals an actor’s perspective on storytelling. She’s not praising baseball for athletic purity; she’s praising its utility. The "baseball genre" is shorthand for a particular emotional toolkit: the slow pacing that allows character studies, the ritualized repetition that mirrors daily life, the inevitability of striking out that makes redemption credible. Comedy slips in as a kind of humility: she knows the metaphor is obvious, so she defuses it with wordplay, signaling she’s in on the cliché while still using it.

The subtext is pragmatic, almost writerly: baseball is a catch-all because it’s structured, iconic, and overdetermined. That’s why it keeps returning on screen - not because it’s America’s pastime, but because it’s a sturdy narrative glove, built to catch themes without dropping them.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Griffiths, Rachel. (n.d.). I think baseball - the baseball genre - is this mitt, to use a double pun there, to catch a whole bunch of themes. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-think-baseball-the-baseball-genre-is-this-71022/

Chicago Style
Griffiths, Rachel. "I think baseball - the baseball genre - is this mitt, to use a double pun there, to catch a whole bunch of themes." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-think-baseball-the-baseball-genre-is-this-71022/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I think baseball - the baseball genre - is this mitt, to use a double pun there, to catch a whole bunch of themes." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-think-baseball-the-baseball-genre-is-this-71022/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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Rachel Griffiths: baseball as a genre mitt
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About the Author

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Rachel Griffiths (born June 4, 1968) is a Actress from USA.

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