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.
— Branch Rickey
Delightful Motivational Baseball quotations
It's not the disability that defines you;
it's how you deal with the challenges the disability presents you with.
If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere
If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in 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.
Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren't we all?
No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games.
No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.
Nobody wanted me. Scouts told me to go to school, to forget baseball. Coaches said, 'You're never going to make it.' I appreciated their honesty, because I think when someone tells you something you may not like, you have to use that as fuel for motivation.
It isn't hard to be good from time to time in sports. What is tough, is being good every day.
The best possible thing in baseball is winning The World Series.
The second best thing is losing The World Series.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Don't be afraid to take advice. There's always something new to learn.
When I played ball, I didn't play for fun.
. . . It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.
Well, boys, it's a round ball and a round bat and you got to hit the ball square.
You owe it to yourself to be the best you can possibly be - in baseball and in life.
There's nothing wrong with the Little League World Series that locking out the adults couldn't cure.
If you win through bad sportsmanship that's no real victory.
Sweat plus sacrifice equals success.
The one constant through all the years has been baseball.
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.
It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.
The saddest day of the year is the day baseball season ends.
I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.
Baseball is more than a game. It's like life played out on a field.
Wrestling is the only sport I've ever competed in that puts you totally in a situation of constant motion without breaks. I could play football or baseball, swim -- but there's always some kind of situation that would break my thoughts, break my concentration.
If you don t know where you are, a map won't help.
You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.
NO MAN CAN AVOID BEING BORN AVERAGE, BUT NO MAN HAS TO STAY AVERAGE.
When they knock you down, you not only have to get up, but you have to make it clear that you won't be knocked down a second time.
A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.
Well, there are three things that the average man thinks he can do better than anybody else. Build a fire, run a hotel and manage a baseball team.
Finding good players is easy. Getting them to play as a team is another story.
Making love is like hitting a baseball. You just gotta relax and concentrate.
What's tough is being good every day.
In baseball, I was always in control of everything until I let the ball go.