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.

–Jim Bouton_

Sure I fought. I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me... tried every dirty trick to cut me down. But I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

 –Ty Cobb

 

Nice guys finish last.

–Leo Durocher

 

Baseball is a game, yes. It is also a business. But what it most truly is is disguised combat. For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.

–Willie Mays

Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of the hit-and-run.

–Branch Rickey

 

There are only two places in this league, first place and no place.

 –Tom Seaver

 

What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife’s fidelity and his mother’s respectability.

–George Bernard Shaw

 

Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved.

 –Red Smith

 

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

 –Ted Williams

 

How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball... The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.

 –Babe Ruth

 

Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.

–Yogi Berra

 

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

–Robert Frost

 

Baseball is the only sport I know that when you are on offense the other team controls the ball.

 –Ken Harrelson

 

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.

 –Casey Stengel

 

Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the 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 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? Sure I’m lucky… When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift – that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remembers you with trophies – that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter – that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body – it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed – that’s the finest I know. So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for.

 –Lou Gehrig’s Farewell, July 4, 1939

 

I never knew how someone dying could say he was the luckiest man in the world. But now I understand.

 –Mickey Mantle, after his own retirement

 

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470, or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)