“Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it”

Sportswriter Arthur Daley (1904-1976) wrote in “Sports of the Times” in the New York (NY) Times of November 10, 1964:
 
“As some sage once wrote: Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it.”
 
It is not known who that “sage” is. The expression has also applied to other sports. “Hockey is a great game. It has to be to survive the people who run it” was cited in 1966.
 
   
National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association
1976 – Arthur Daley
Born in New York, New York, on July 31, 1904, sportswriting legend Arthur Daley was the first sportswriter to win a Pulitzer Prize. Daley Joined The New York Times in 1926 taking on the fight, basketball, and football beats. During this period he also covered the 1936 Olympics, in Berlin, becoming the first Times sportswriter to receive a foreign assignment. In 1942, he inherited John Kieran’s column “Sports of the Times,” which he continued to write until his death in 1976. It was for his outstanding work on “Sports of the Times” that he won his Pulitzer Prize in 1956.
 
10 November 1964, New York (NY) Times, “Sports of The Times” by Arthur Daley:
As some sage once wrote: Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it.
 
12 February 1966, Lethbridge (Alberta) Herald, Don Pilling column, pg. 10, col. 2:
“Hockey is a great game,” wrote (New York columnist Dan—ed.) Parker. “It has to be to survive the people who run it.”
   
Chicago (IL) Tribune
5 April 1973, Chicago (IL) Tribune, “Do merger talks hint quick end to World war? ” by Bob Verdi, sec. 3, pg. 3, col. 4:
PROFESSIONAL hockey must be a great product to have survived the people who run it.
 
New York (NY) Times
The Men Who Run Baseball
Red Smith
October 26, 1975,
Section Sports, Page 221
“Baseball must be a great game,” a wise man wrote many years ago. “It survives the men who run it.”
   
Google Books
Sportswit
By Lee Green
New York, NY: Ballantine Books
1986, ©1984
Pg. 38:
ARTHUR DALEY writer:
“Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it.”
 
WBUR (NPR—Boston, MA)
FIFA’s Nest Of Thieves
Thu, May 28, 2015
by Bill Littlefield
An old saying, which I first heard applied to baseball, goes like this: “It must be a heck of a great game to have survived the people who run it.”
 
Soccer is a great game.