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Portal:Baseball/Selected quote

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Selected quote 1

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/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.

Selected quote 2

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Chicks do dig the long ball. Umpires dig ground balls and two-hour games. Chicks don't dig that.

Selected quote 3

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The two most important things in life: good friends and a strong bullpen.

Selected quote 4

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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.

Selected quote 5

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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.
Ban Johnson, American League President, December 24, 1922.

Selected quote 6

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/6

When [Scott] Boras talks to Tom Hicks, does he first have to enter a PIN?
Mike DiGiovanna, Los Angeles Times sportswriter, on free agency negotiations between the sports agent and owner of the Texas Rangers, collective brokers of US$383 million in contracts

Selected quote 7

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/7

If you're going to play at all, you're out to win. Baseball, board games, playing Jeopardy!, I hate to lose.''

Selected quote 8

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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.
Ted Williams, Boston Red Sox left fielder, on his childhood baseball idol

Selected quote 9

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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.

Selected quote 10

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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.

Selected quote 11

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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.

Selected quote 12

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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.

Selected quote 13

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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.
Ichiro Suzuki, Seattle Mariners right fielder, 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

Selected quote 14

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/14

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.
Pete Rose, Cincinnati Reds second baseman, on his explanation for his professional] success

Selected quote 15

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/15

The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws.
Rick Wise, St. Louis Cardinals starting pitcher, on the American League's 1973 implementation of a rule permitting another player to bat in place of a pitcher

Selected quote 16

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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.
Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox owner, on the contemporary disfavoring by Major League Baseball executives of players' acting boisterously off-field

Selected quote 17

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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.''

Selected quote 18

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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.
Bowie Kuhn, Former Major League Commissioner

Selected quote 19

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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.

Selected quote 20

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Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.

Selected quote 21

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Casey [Stengel] called me into the clubhouse and said, 'If anyone's going to be a clown on this club, it's going to be me.'

Selected quote 22

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I'm done trying to figure [...] out [what went wrong]. The more I try to figure them out, the bigger headache I get.

Selected quote 23

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Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

Selected quote 24

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When you come to a fork in the road....Take it.

Selected quote 25

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It ain't over 'til it's over.
Yogi Berra, In July 1973, when the New York Mets trailed the Chicago Cubs by 9½ games in the National League East; the Mets won the division title on the final day of the season.

Selected quote 26

Selected quote 27

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"Any umpire who lasts five years in the minor leagues deserves to be immortalized. Any umpire who lasts ten or more years in the minors deserves to be institutionalized."
Ron Luciano, on umpiring in the minor leagues.

Selected quote 28

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"When we win, I'm so happy I eat a lot. When we lose, I'm so depressed, I eat a lot. When we're rained out, I'm so disappointed I eat a lot."

Selected quote 29

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Selected quote 31

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It's a great day for a ball game; let's play two!

Selected quote 32

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I ain't an athlete, lady. I'm a ballplayer.
John Kruk

Selected quote 33

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Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years, and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?
Lou Gehrig, speech made on Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day at Yankee at Yankee Stadium (July 4, 1939)

Selected quote 34

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Pudge is so old, they didn't have history class when he went to school.
Steve Lyons, referring to his 42-year-old teammate Carlton "Pudge" Fisk in 1990.

Selected quote 35

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Hating the [New York] Yankees is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax.

Selected quote 36

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/36

"We're so bad right now that for us back-to-back home runs means one today and another one tomorrow."

Selected quote 37

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/37

"On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'"

Selected quote 38

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/38

"The only way to make money as a manager is to win in one place, get fired and hired somewhere else."

Selected quote 39

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/39

"Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it."

Selected quote 40

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"Problem with (John) Wockenfuss getting on base is that it takes three doubles to score him."

Selected quote 41

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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.

Selected quote 42

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I bleed Dodger blue and when I die, I'm going to the big Dodger in the sky.

Selected quote 43

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/43

Good fielding and pitching, without hitting, or vice versa, is like Ben Franklin's half a pair of scissors - ineffectual.
Moe Berg

Selected quote 44

Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/44

Two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water. The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.
Ralph Kiner, broadcaster for the New York Mets


The Selected quote box on the portal chooses one of the following at random when displaying the page. Follow the instructions below for adding or nominating a new quote to the list.

Usage

Baseball related quotations can be added directly to this list without nomination.

Template

{{Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/Layout
  |quote=
  |link=
  |detail=
}}<noinclude>
[[Category:Baseball portal selected quotes|{{SUBPAGENAME}}]]
</noinclude>

The template will auto-wikilink the article entered in the link= field. Further information on this template can be found at Portal:Baseball/Selected quote/Layout.

To add a new article

  1. Click on the next successive empty entry or red link from this page.
  2. Paste the above layout template if it isn't already there.
  3. Enter the quotation in the text= field and the originator of the quote as the link=
  4. Use the detail= element to give context to the quote if needed i.e. "on being verbally attacked by X"
  5. Preview the page and check that it is correct
  6. Save the page
  7. Go to the main Portal:Baseball page.
  8. Click on edit page.
  9. Update "max=" to its new total for the {{Random portal component}} on the main page. The line which is edited is this one: {{Random portal component|max=4|header=Selected quote|subpage=Selected quote}} Make sure that "max=" is the same numerical value as the article entry added above (i.e. if you added quote 43, then max=43)