Bravery is a complicated thing to describe. You can’t say it’s three feet long and two feet wide and that it weighs four hundred pounds or that it’s colored bright blue or that it sounds like a piano or that it smells like roses. It’s a quality, not a thing.
He foresaw the platooning that managers like Casey Stengel used years before it happened. He told me I had to be a switch-hitter if I was going to play.
Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else’s brain, who knows how good a player I might have been.
I’ll play baseball for the Army or fight for it, whatever they want me to do.
I can’t play any more. I can’t hit the ball when I need to. I can’t steal second when I need to. I can’t go from first to third when I need to. I can’t score from second when I need to. I have to quit.
I guess you could say I’m what this country is all about.
Because the players knew that if Billy asked them to jump off a roof, he’d jump off with them.
The thing I really liked about Mickey was the way he treated everyone the same.
All I have is natural ability.
You don’t realize how easy this game is until you get up in that broadcasting booth.
It was all I lived for, to play baseball.
If you want to know who was better, me or Willie Mays, you have to look at our career stats. And Willie’s bottom line was better.
Stay away from drugs and alcohol. Listen to your moms and dads. In this great country of ours you do whatever you set your mind to. Make us proud of you.
I don’t care what the situation was, how high the stakes were – the bases could be loaded and the pennant riding on every pitch, it never bothered Whitey. He pitched his game. Cool. Craft. Nerves of steel.
It’s what you’re worth.
His fielding leaves you wondering. Then he steps up to hit and all doubts start to fade.
To play 18 years in Yankee Stadium is the best thing that could ever happen to a ballplayer.
In 1960 when Pittsburgh beat us in the World Series, we outscored them 55-27. It was the only time I think the better team lost. I was so disappointed I cried on the plane ride home.
They should have come out of the dugout on tippy-toes, holding hands and singing.
When I hit a home run I usually didn’t care where it went. So long as it was a home run was all that mattered.