Portal:Baseball/Quotes

Quotes 1

• When you make a bad pitch and the hitter puts it out of the park and you cost your team the game, it's a real test of your maturity to be able to stand in front of your locker fifteen minutes later and admit it to the world. How many people in other professions would be willing to have their job performances evaluated that way, in front of millions, every afternoon at five o'clock. — Bob Feller
• Chicks do dig the long ball. Umpires dig ground balls and two-hour games. Chicks don't dig that. — David Cone
• The two most important things in life: good friends and a strong bullpen. — Bob Gibson
• I'm mad at Hank (Aaron) for deciding to play one more season. I threw him his last home run and thought I'd be remembered forever. Now, I'll have to throw him another. — Bill "Spaceman" Lee

Quotes 2

• We are and have been traveling along a fictitious prosperity for the last two or three years, and the sooner we step down the better it will be for the game and everybody concerned. Next season may not be so good for the owners. Good times have affected their heads and they are unconsciously doing baseball an almost irreparable injury by inflating the price on players as they have this year. There is likely to be a slump in baseball and then some of the owners will wish they had kept the strings tied to their pocketbooks. — American League President Ban Johnson, December 24, 1922.
• When [Scott] Boras talks to Tom Hicks, does he first have to enter a PIN number? — Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike DiGiovanna, on free agency negotiations subsequent to the 2006 Major League Baseball season betwixt the two, respectively a sports agent and the owner of the Texas Rangers, theretofore collective brokers of US$383 million in contracts
• If you're going to play at all, you're out to win. Baseball, board games, playing Jeopardy!, I hate to lose. — New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, pictured at right, on winning

Quotes 3

• A kid copies what is good. I remember the first time I saw Lefty O'Doul, and he was as far away as those palms. And I saw the guy come to bat in batting practice. I was looking through a knothole, and I said, 'Geez, does that guy look good!' And it was Lefty O'Doul, one of the greatest hitters ever. — Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams, on his childhood baseball idol
• In the end it all comes down to talent. You can talk all you want about intangibles, I just don't know what that means. Talent makes winners, not intangibles. Can nice guys win? Sure, nice guys can win - if they're nice guys with a lot of talent. Nice guys with a little talent finish fourth and nice guys with no talent finish last. — Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, on talent
• There are surprisingly few real students of the game in baseball; partly because everybody, my eighty-three year old grandmother included, thinks they learned all there was to know about it at puberty. Baseball is very beguiling that way. — Major League Baseball manager Alvin Dark, on learning in baseball
• It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. — Major League Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, on the baseball season
• Managing can be more discouraging than playing, especially when you're losing because when you're a player, there are at least individual goals you can shoot for. When you're a manager all the worries of the team become your worries. — Major League Baseball manager Chicago White Sox, on managing

Quotes 4

• I'm not a big guy and hopefully kids could look at me and see that I'm not muscular and not physically imposing, that I'm just a regular guy. So if somebody with a regular body can get into the record books, kids can look at that. That would make me happy. — Seattle Mariners right fielder Ichiro Suzuki (right), on his having, in the 2004 Major League Baseball season, displaced Saint Louis Browns first baseman George Sisler atop the enumeration of Major League players by most hits in a single season despite his measuring just 69 inches (1.75 metres) and weighing just 160 pounds (72.57 kilograms), and on the distinction betwixt his physique and those of others accused of doping
• People say I don't have great tools. They say that I can't throw like Ellis Valentine or run like Tim Raines or hit with power like Mike Schmidt. Who can? I make up for it in other ways, by putting out a little bit more. That's my theory, to go through life hustling. In the big leagues, hustle usually means being in the right place at the right time. It means backing up a base. It means backing up your teammate. It means taking that headfirst slide. It means doing everything you can do to win a baseball game. — Cincinnati Reds second baseman Pete Rose, on his explanation for his professional success
• The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws. — Saint Louis Cardinals starting pitcher Rick Wise, on the 1973 implementation by the American League of Major League Baseball of a rule permitting another player to bat in place of a pitcher

Quotes 5

• What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!...Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils....Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober. — Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck, on the contemporary disfavoring by Major League Baseball executives of players' acting boisterously off-field
• Money wasn't an issue because I could have made more money playing in Japan. This is like going from a beat-up Volkswagen to a Mercedes. — Starting pitcher Masato Yoshii, on his departing the Tokyo Yakult Swallows of the Japanese Central League for the New York Mets of Major League Baseball
• I believe in the Rip Van Winkle Theory: that a man from 1910 must be able to wake up after being asleep for 70 years, walk into a ballpark, and understand baseball perfectly. — Former Major League Commissioner Bowie Kuhn
• Greaseball, greaseball, greaseball, that's all I throw him (Rod Carew), and he still hits them. He's the only player in baseball who consistently hits my grease. He sees the ball so well, I guess he can pick out the dry side. — Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry