Baseball Hitter Quotes & Sayings

Never allow yourself to dwell on your weaknesses, your failures, your unhappy condition. Hold firmly the ideal of your efficiency, your competency, your divinity, the conviction that you were made for health, success, and happiness, and struggle vigorously to attain that which will help you to realize this condition. — Orison Swett Marden

He's the strangest hitter in baseball. Figure him out one way and he'll kill you another. — Sandy Koufax

That moment when the person actually dictates the way I do the portrait is when the intimacy arrives. — Francesco Clemente

There's different kinds of laughs. It's like a baseball lineup: this guy's your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we're gonna win. — Jerry Seinfeld

I'm a fastball hitter. It's no secret I'm looking for a fastball every pitch. I think it's one of the hardest things to do in sports-to hit a moving baseball. — Carlos Delgado

It's Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It's Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history - and then seven days later clinching the World Series. It's Pedro Martinez and his six hitless innings of postseason relief against the Indians. Yes, it is also Cy Young and Roger Clemens, and the 192 wins in a Red Sox uniform that they share - the perfect game for Young, the 20 strikeout games for Clemens - but it is also Bill Dinneen clinching the 1903 World Series with a busted, bloody hand, and Jose Santiago shutting down Minnesota with two games left in the season to keep the 1967 Impossible Dream alive, and Jim Lonborg clinching the Impossible Dream the very next day, and Jim Lonborg again, tossing a one-hitter and a three-hitter in the 1967 World Series, and Luis Tiant in the 1975 postseason, shutting out Oakland and Cincinnati in back-to-back starts. They are all winners. — Tucker Elliot

That's one of the great oddities of baseball: Success is relative. A hitter who fails 70 percent of the time at the plate is a potential member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and many World Championship teams lose more than 70 games during their title-winning seasons. — Don Yaeger

In the center of God's will, we find the greatest peace, fulfillment, and joy. — April Cassidy

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Traditionally, baseball punishes preening. In a society increasingly tolerant of exhibitionism, it is splendid when a hitter is knocked down because in his last at bat he lingered at the plate to admire his home run. — George Will

I wonder why there is a designated hitter in baseball after all these years? As an experiment, it seemed like a swell enough idea, but you would think the novelty would have worn off by now and everyone would get back to playing baseball. — Jay Mohr

He'd shut the door on the subject of loss, thrown all the bolts, and shoved a heavy table up against it for good measure. — Cecilia Grant

Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games. Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible-it is a matter of record — Michael Lewis

There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder. More mistakes are made hitting than in any other part of the game. — Ted Williams

A well-designed and humane interface does not need to be split into beginner and expert subsystems. — Jef Raskin

A no-hitter secures a pitcher's spot on an elite yet diverse list that embraces Hall of Famers, struggling journeymen, and wide-eyed rookies. — Dirk Lammers

The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain's free throws. — Rick Wise

A no-hitter is a freaky thing,' Tweet said. 'Most of the greatest pitchers never pitched one. It's a combination of a lot of little accidents. — Duane Decker

Balls and strikes are the basic tenet to everything in baseball. From the perspective of hitting, pitching, offense and defense, it's all about the strike zone and how the battle is waged there between the pitcher and hitter. — Doug Harvey

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

The naked pinch hitter takes only one thing to the plate: his raw, and somewhat irrational, confidence in himself. That this confidence is so unreasonable adds to its dignity. — Thomas Boswell

I believe it is a tradition in baseball that when a pitcher has a no-hitter going, no one reminds him of it. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Golf ... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well. — P.G. Wodehouse

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody. — James Carville

A hitter's impatience is the pitcher's biggest advantage. — Pete Rose

The best hitter I ever saw was Ted Williams. — Mickey Mantle

You should have seen Willie Wells play shortstop: as good as Ozzie Smith and a better hitter. How I wish people could have seen Ray Dandridge play third base, as good as Brooks Robinson and Craig Nettles and all of those. He was bowlegged; a train might go through there, but not a baseball. — Monte Irvin

When Dr. James Young Simpson sought to apply anesthesia to a woman in childbirth, the clergymen of his day foamed at the mouth and spat upon him with vituperation and abuse, for attempting to violate God's direct command that 'in pain thou shalt bring forth children,' as based upon the idiotic text of the Bible. But Dr. Simpson persisted despite the ravings of the religious lunatics of his day.
The importance of Dr. Simpson's application of anesthesia to the relief of pain in childbirth, and his open defiance of the religionists, are beyond the measure of words to evaluate. — Joseph Lewis

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. — Mickey Mantle

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon. — David Brooks

The game of baseball between pitcher and hitter sets up like a game of chess in that you have to anticipate several moves ahead to set up your opponent. — Brad Lidge

I hope that if love hurts, it teaches you something about yourself or about someone else. — Iain S. Thomas

Every hitter likes fastballs, just like everybody likes ice cream. But you don't like it when someone's stuffing it into you by the gallon. That's what it feels like when Nolan Ryan's thrown balls by you. — Reggie Jackson

My biggest regret was letting my lifetime average drop below .300. I always felt I was a .300 hitter, and if I could change one thing that would be it. — Mickey Mantle

Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
Crash Davis Bull Durham — Ron Shelton

To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband's war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we'd crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride. — Sara Gruen

For hitter or pitcher, rookie or veteran, baseball has long been defined by failure rather than success, the old a-.300-hitter-gets-out-7-times-in-10-at-bats truism. Dealing with and managing failure is an essential - some would say the essential - part of the job description. — Barry Svrluga

There's always the syndrome of the parent-child relationship: when someone has known you since you were very young, it doesn't matter how much more independent, how much older or more mature you get - there is still that element, the dynamic of the relationship that is very hard to successfully transform, and that has nothing to do with the music-making, in the end. — Helene Grimaud

A man has to have goals - for a day, for a lifetime - and that was mine, to have people say, 'There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived. — Ted Willams