Best 2491 quotes in «baseball quotes» category

You can get base hits or home runs, but you can’t get a grand slam without both.

You can make it to AAA ball on talent only. It's difficult but it can be done. But to make it to the big leagues, you HAVE to be coachable. You have to stay coachable.

You can say, 'Well, if they tore down Fenway Park, we can build a new one.' But you wouldn’t build it right. It’s better to make the accommodations, to save the old ballparks. If Fenway Park needs sky boxes to bring in the poverty-stricken owners enough money to save the stadium before they tear it down and move it someplace else, then build the damn sky boxes. If Wrigley Field needs lights to survive, put up the damn lights.... Make the damn structural improvements, but save the ballpark because when you try to rebuild a cathedral five hundred years too late, it doesn’t come out the same.

You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.

You didn't play baseball that well with two hands. How do you think you're going to make it with one? "If you're just going to tell me what I can't do, you can leave.

You have intellect, and courage, and command. Play your own game, and don't worry about what anyone else is doing. That is what's going to give you a shot at making it. Comparing yourself to anyone else will just drive you crazy.

You’re not going to always hit a home run in life. You’re going to strike out! You’re going to walk to the dugout of life, frustrated, while spectators chirp your name in judgment. They’re afraid to even get on the field, and you know it. The fact that you get back up there, unafraid, going after that next home run, makes you the person you are.

A baseball manager has learned a lot about his job from having played the game, but a parent has not learned a thing from having once been a child.

A baseball swing is a very finely tuned instrument. It is repetition, and more repetition, then a little more after that.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

You see, 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.

A baseball club is part of the chemistry of the city. A game isn't just an athletic contest. It's a picnic, a kind of town meeting.

A baseball game is twice as much fun if you're seeing it on the company's time.

A baseball manager is a necessary evil.

A baseball field must be the most beautiful thing in the world. It's so honest and precise. And we play on it. Every star gets humbled. Every mediocre player has a great moment.

A bit of baseball wisdom: You can't steal second with your foot on first.

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.

Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.

A boy cannot begin playing ball too early. I might almost say that while he is still creeping on all fours he should have a bouncing rubber ball.

A brilliant idea without action is like Mark McGwire playing baseball without a bat.

A catcher and his body are like the outlaw and his horse. He's got to ride that nag till it drops.

A catcher must want to catch. He must make up his mind that it isn't the terrible job it is painted, and that he isn't going to say every day, 'Why, oh why with so many other positions in baseball did I take up this one.'

Accusations fit on Greenwald really sounds like he's against all surveillance unless you can find a guy with the Al Qaeda card, wearing an Al Qaeda baseball cap, an Al Qaeda uniform.

A baseball team is like a band. Because, conceptually, there are no heroes in baseball - there's just the team.

A critic once characterized baseball as six minutes of action crammed into two-and-one-half hours.

A cloud hangs over baseball. It's a cloud called drugs and it's permeated our game.

A coach's main job is to reawaken a spirit in which the players can blend together effortlessly.

Activate your fans, don’t just collect them like baseball cards.

A fan without a team is like a hog without truffles - she has nothing to root for.

A day without newspapers is like walking around without your pants on.

After a play in the field Casey would turn (to the players on the bench) and say 'What did he do wrong?' or 'You're better than that guy.' Either way, he'd keep them from getting stale.

After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.

After they remodeled Yankee Stadium I didn't feel that the ghosts were there anymore. It just wasn't the same.

After the strike, I lost interest. In reality, neither players nor owners care in the least about the fans. The greed of both factions has destroyed baseball's credibility, at least for the present.

A full mind is an empty bat.

A game of great charm in the adoption of mathematical measurements to the timing of human movements, the exactitudes and adjustments of physical ability to hazardous chance. The speed of the legs, the dexterity of the body, the grace of the swing, the elusiveness of the slide - these are the features that make Americans everywhere forget the last syllable of a man's last name or the pigmentation of his skin.

A good umpire is the umpire you don't even notice

A good lead-off hitter is a pain in the ass to pitchers.

A great catch is like watching girls go by. The last one you see is always the prettiest.

Ain't no man can avoid being born average, but there ain't no man got to be common.

Ain't no sense worryin' about the things you got control over, 'cause if you got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'. And ain't no sense worryin' about the things you don't got control over, 'cause if you don't got control over 'em, ain't no sense worryin'.

A hitter's impatience is the pitcher's biggest advantage.

Ah wonder if anybody this side of the Atlantic has ever bought a baseball bat with playing baseball in mind.

A kid might help another kid who fell into a river, and a kid might help another kid search for a lost baseball, but there isn't a kid I've met who will help another kid out of a humiliating situation. We just aren't built that way.

[A knuckleball is] a curve ball that doesn't give a damn.

All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.

All ballplayers want to wind up their careers with the Cubs, Giants or Yankees. They just can't help it.

All baseball fans can be divided into two groups: those who come to batting practice and the others. Only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.

All I ask is that you bust your heiny on that field.