TY COBB

I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me... but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

To get along with me, don't increase my tension.

Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

I never could stand losing. Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly.

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

The base paths belonged to me, the runner. The rules gave me the right. I always went into a bag full speed, feet first. I had sharp spikes on my shoes. If the baseman stood where he had no business to be and got hurt, that was his fault.

I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.

The crowd makes the ballgame.

Don't come home a failure.

The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it.

Speed is a great asset; but it's greater when it's combined with quickness - and there's a big difference.

When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.

Baseball was one-hundred percent of my life.

The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves.

I may have been fierce, but never low or underhand.

I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

The way those clubs shift against Ted Williams, I can't understand how he can be so stupid not to accept the challenge to him and hit to left field.

Most collisions out on the fields are needless.

The longer I live, the longer I realize that batting is more a mental matter than it is physical. The ability to grasp the bat, swing at the proper time, take a proper stance; all these are elemental. Batting is rather a study in psychology, a sizing up of a pitcher and catcher and observing little details that are of immense importance. It's like the study of crime, the work of a detective as he picks up clues.

Every man in the game, from the minors on up, is not only fighting against the other side, but he's trying to hold onto his own job against those on his own bench who'd love to take it away. Why deny this? Why minimize it? Why not boldly admit it?

That boy Mantle is a good one.

When I played ball, I didn't play for fun.

Walter Johnson's fastball looked about the size of a watermelon seed and it hissed at you as it passed.

The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy windup and then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him... Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.

No man has ever been a perfect ballplayer. Stan Musial, however, is the closest to being perfect in the game today.