“The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.”

Too many kids today are playing major league ball and don’t belong there.

I’m a ballplayer, not an actor.

There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first time. I owe him my best.

Motivation is something nobody else can give you. Others can help motivate you, but basically it must come from you and it must be a constant desire to do your very best at all times and under any circumstances.

All pitchers are born pitchers.

There’s always some youngster coming up- they’ll find somebody.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

There’s nobody taking center from me until I give it up.

Now this is over thirty years later and the guy said he was that cab driver. He apologized and he was serious. I felt awful. He might have been spending his whole life thinking he had jinxed me, but I told him he hadn’t. My number was up.

We need a hit, so here I go.

I thought he had been shot.

Baseball didn’t really get into my blood until I knocked off that hitting streak. Getting a daily hit became more important to me than eating, drinking or sleeping.

At my age, I’m just happy to be named the greatest living anything.

I want to thank the good lord for making me a yankee

I feel like I have reached the stage where I can no longer produce for my club, my manager, and my teammates.

In that case Mr. Barrow, Mr. Gehrig is a very underpaid ballplayer.

Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat…. Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

There’s a lot of things I would definitely go to bat for in Hawaii. I’ve been all over that stuff. If someone told me to be quiet about that because of my profession, no. That’s my people.

I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.

I don’t believe that there’s a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it’s like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that’s OK – the bat had to get Ozzy shots.

My pitching philosophy is simple – keep the ball way from the bat.

A lifetime contract for a coach means if you’re ahead in the third quarter and moving the ball, they can’t fire you.

People have asked me a lot of times, because I didn’t hit a lot, how long a dozen bats would last me.