Casey Stengel Quotes
“Lefthanders have more enthusiasm for life. They sleep on the wrong side of the bed and their head gets more stagnant on that side.”
“The way our luck has been lately, our fellas have been getting hurt on their days off.”
“We are in such a slump that even the ones that are drinkin’ aren’t hittin’.”
“You look up and down the bench and you have to say to yourself, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’”
“There comes a time in every man’s life and I’ve had plenty of them.”
“I don’t know if he throws a spitball, but he sure spits on the ball.”
“A shave, please, but don’t cut my throat. I may want to do it later myself.”
“Look at him. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t chew and he doesn’t stay out late — and he still can’t hit.”
“Now there’s three things you can do in a baseball game: You can win or you can lose or it can rain.”
“Bobby Brown reminds me of a fellow who’s been hitting for 12 years and fielding one.”
“See that fella over there? He’s 20 years old. In 10 years, he’s got a chance to be a star. Now that fella over there, he’s 20 years old, too. In 10 years he’s got a chance to be 30.”
“I stayed up last night and watched the Republican Convention all night long. I watched all of them talk, and listened to them and seen them and I’m not interested in politics. If you watch them and listen to them you can find out why.”
“You gotta lose ‘em some of the time. When you do, lose ‘em right.”
“Oldtimers weekends and airplane landings are alike. If you can walk away from them, they’re successful.”
“Good pitching will stop good hitting and vice-versa.”
“Without losers where would winners be?”
“Once someone gave me a picture and I wrote ‘Do good in school.’ I looked up and the guy was 78 years old”
“Well, God is certainly getting an earful tonight.” - Jim Murray, sportswriter, penning the perfect eulogy upon Stengel’s death in 1975
“I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again.”
Managing is getting paid for home runs that someone else hits.
“They have shown me ways to lose I never knew existed.”
“The only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets double header.”
“Nobody knows this [yet], but one of us has just been traded to Kansas City.”
“They examined all my organs. Some of them are quite remarkable and others are not so good. A lot of museums are bidding for them.” -
“Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.”
“I broke in with four hits and the writers promptly declared they had seen the new Ty Cobb. It took me only a few days to correct that impression.”
“All right, everybody line up alphabetically according to your height.”
“The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
“I couldn’t have done it without my players.” - on winning the World Series
“Well, we’ve got this Johnny Lewis in the outfield. They hit a ball to him yesterday, and he turned left, then he turned right, then he went straight back and caught the ball. He made three good plays in one. And Greg Goossen, he’s only twenty and with a good chance in ten years of being thirty.”
“How the hell should I know? Most of the people my age are dead. You could look it up.”
“The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.”
“You gotta learn that if you don’t get it by midnight, chances are you ain’t gonna get it, and if you do, it ain’t worth it.”
“You have to have a catcher because if you don’t you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls.”
“You can’t get into the Hall of Fame unless you limp.”
“I’d always heard it couldn’t be done, but sometimes it don’t always work.”
“Johnny Sain don’t say much, but that don’t matter much, because when you’re out there on the mound, you got nobody to talk to.”
“Jerry Lumpe looks like the best hitter in the world until you put him in the lineup.”
“Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.”
“I was such a dangerous hitter I even got intentional walks in batting practice.”
“I would not admire hitting against Ryne Duren, because if he ever hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.”
“I don’t like them fellas who drive in two runs and let in three.”
“They say some of my stars drink whiskey. But I have found that the ones who drink milkshakes don’t win many ballgames.”