Quotes on Baseball

If you seriously aspire to be a manager in the big leagues, there is a baseball 'book' that one must learn. Alongside that book, you must practice Spanish. Of 25 players on each roster, sometimes there are between eight and 15 players who speak Spanish.

When I took the job as the manager of the Olympic team, I didn't take it because I was a Dodger. I did it because I was an American, and I wanted to bring that gold medal where it belongs in baseball, the United States. And that's exactly what our team did.

I enjoy baseball more than anything and would like to be involved with it forever, but the reality is your survival is determined by how well you compete, not by your fondness for the game.

Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.

You can't second-guess baseball. You can't second-guess yourself.

I was able to live out my dream of playing baseball, and I've got to do the same for my kids and let them live out their dreams of whatever they want to do in life.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.

Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brilliant World Series catch, and then dashing off to play stickball in the street with his teenage pals. That’s baseball. So is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gehrig saying, ‘I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.’

Baseball is a lot like life. It's a day-to-day existence, full of ups and downs. You make the most of your opportunities in baseball as you do in life.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip.

Baseball for me was instinctive, born within me, given to me as a gift from God.

The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.

NO MAN CAN AVOID BEING BORN AVERAGE, BUT NO MAN HAS TO STAY AVERAGE.

The most important part of a player's body is above his shoulders.

You don't save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.

If you don't win, you're going to be fired. If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired.

Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.

One of the beautiful things about baseball is that every once in a while you come into a situation where you want to, and where you have to, reach down and prove something.

Statistics are the lifeblood of baseball. In no other sport are so many available and studied so assiduously by participants and fans. Much of the game's appeal, as a conversation piece, lies in the opportunity the fan gets to back up opinions and arguments with convincing figures, and it is entirely possible that more American boys have mastered long division by dealing with batting averages than in any other way.