Babe Ruth (1895 – 1948)
American Major League Baseball player from 1914 to 1935, named as the greatest baseball player in history in various surveys and rankings.
A man who knows he's making money for other people ought to get some of the profits he brings in. Don't make any difference if it's baseball or a bank or a vaudeville show. It's business, I tell you. There ain't no sentiment to it. Forget that stuff.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad. You know this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth. That means the boys. And after you've been a boy, and grow up to know how to play ball, then you come to the boys you see representing themselves today in our national pastime.
Some twenty years ago I stopped talking about the Babe for the simple reason that I realized that those who had never seen him didn't believe me.
What the hell has Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did.
Words fail me. When he stood up there at the bat before 50,000 persons, calling the balls and the strikes with gestures for the benefit of the Cubs in their dugout, and then with two strikes on him, pointed out where he was going to hit the next one and hit it there, I gave up. That fellow is not human.
If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. I have the same violent temper my father and older brother had. Both died of injuries from street fights in Baltimore, fights begun by flare-ups of their tempers.
There's been so many lovely things said about me, and I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to thank everybody. Thank you.
It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.
I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball. In boxing, your fist usually stops when you hit a man, but its possible to hit so hard that your fist doesn't stop. I try to follow through in the same way. The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.
He wasn’t a baseball player. He was a worldwide celebrity, an international star, the likes of which baseball has never seen since.
Babe's interviewer interrupted to point the hole in which Babe put himself Saturday when he pointed out the spot he intended hitting his home run and asked the Great Man if he realized how ridiculous he would have appeared if he had struck out?
"I never thought of it," said the Great Man. He simply had made up his mind to hit a home run and he did.
The only real game — I think — in the world is baseball.
I can't honestly say that I appreciate the way in which he changed baseball — from a game of science to an extension of his powerful slugging — but he was the most natural and unaffected man I ever knew. No one ever loved life more. No one ever inspired more youngsters. I have reverence for his marvelous ability . I look forward to meeting him again some day.
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime.
If I'd just tried for them dinky singles I could've batted around six hundred!
I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.
All ballplayers should quit when it starts to feel as if all the baselines run uphill.
I didn't mean to hit the umpire with the dirt, but I did mean to hit that bastard in the stands.
After all, there's only one aswer to be made to the young fellow who is asking constantly for advice as to how to hit. The answer is: "Pick out a good one and sock it!"
I decided to pick out the greatest hitter to watch and study, and Jackson was good enough for me.