Daily Inspiration Quote by A. Bartlett Giamatti

"There's nothing bad that accrues from baseball" is the kind of line that dares you to argue with it, then quietly absorbs your objections. Giamatti knew better than anyone that baseball, like any institution, can be petty, politicized, exclusionary, and corruptible. He also happened to serve as MLB commissioner during one of the sport's most infamous crises (the Pete Rose scandal). So the sentence lands less as naivete than as a deliberate act of faith: a humanist insisting that the game’s net effect on civic life is restorative, even when the people running it are not.

The verb "accrues" matters. It’s bureaucratic, almost accounting language, suggesting that over time the sport compounds into something like interest-bearing good: patience, attention, respect for failure, comfort with daily ritual. Baseball is uniquely built for that argument because it’s slow, repetitive, and stubbornly resistant to narrative control. No clock to rescue you. No single superstar can guarantee the ending. The structure forces a culture of delayed gratification, accountability, and second chances.

The subtext is also a defense of the seemingly "unproductive" as morally serious. In an America that increasingly measures value by speed and output, Giamatti frames baseball as a public counter-education: an arena where joy, belonging, and memory aren’t indulgences but social infrastructure. It’s less a claim that baseball is pure than a wager that its rhythms keep a certain kind of decency alive.