Quotes on Baseball

Never compare one student's test score to another's. Always measure a child's progress against her past performance. There will always be a better reader, mathematician, or baseball player. Our goal is to help each student become as special as she can be as an individual--not to be more special than the kid sitting next to her.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

I've tried a lot of things in the off-season, but the only thing I really know is baseball.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.

Baseball is continuity. Pitch to pitch. Inning to inning. Season to season.

Confidence allows you to progress in something you're attempting to accomplish, whether it's playing basketball or baseball or whether it's trying to succeed in business.

When baseball is no longer fun, it's no longer a game.

In baseball, even the best hitters fail seven of ten times, and of those seven failures there are different reasons why. Some are personal failures, others are losses to the pitcher. You just get beat. In those personal failures, I felt I could have done better.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he takes three days off.

Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

I'm no different than others with cancer. I just happen to play professional baseball. I'm part of those statistics that cancer has touched as well.

It (a baseball box score) doesn't tell how big you are, what church you attend, what color you are, or how your father voted in the last election. It just tells what kind of baseball player you were on that particular day.

The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second class citizen to a second class immortal.

I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation.

Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don't move.

I ain't ever had a job, I just always played baseball.

I would not admire hitting against Ryne Duren, because if he ever hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.

You can't get into the Hall of Fame unless you limp.

I walk into the clubhouse today and it's like walking into the Mayo Clinic. We have four doctors, three therapists and five trainers. Back when I broke in, we had one trainer who carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and by the 7th inning he'd already drunk it.

Some day I'm going to have to stand before God, and if He asks me why I didn't let that [Jackie] Robinson fellow play ball, I don't think saying 'because of the color of his skin' would be a good enough answer.