Pete Rose Quotes

I always talk about it like I'm a hitter first and if I'm doing things right and my body's in the right place, I drive the baseball.

The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.

I am an arm hitter. When you snap the bat with your wrists just as you meet the ball, you give the bat tremendous speed for a few inches of its course. The speed with which the bat meets the ball is the thing that counts.

I want to be able to drive the ball to all fields.

Even on home runs that I hit in the past, guys were like, 'Man, you need to slow down. You've got that one.

People always ask me how I can hit the ball so far, and I say, 'I just swing.' It's the coaches who first told me I had good bat speed. I was just swinging, and I guess it was fast. I'm pretty fast at everything.

I consider myself a line drive hitter with power. I just try to put my best swing on the ball every time.

I could always hit. I learned to hit with a broomstick and a ball of tape and I could always get that bat on the ball.

There is no doubt that because I am a switch hitter I have one of the best offensive advantages that a hitter can have.

How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball.

Some batters, and good ones too, scoff at the whole theory of place hitting, calling it a myth. They are wrong, however.

There are certain things I can't do, certain pitches I can't hit. You stay away from them. You try to wait for pitches you can hit. The bat speed isn't what it used to be. You make up for it by using your head, working counts, getting ahead in counts and getting pitches to hit and hitting them hard.

I try to keep it real simple. I try not to add a lot of frosting on what I'm doing. Just take the swing and don't muscle the swing, because if you get in the hitting position and you take the swing, I generate a lot more bat speed, and that works for me.

I love sharing my knowledge of hitting with others. Now coaches and players at all levels can learn my systematic approach to hitting a baseball with more consistency, mental strength and accuracy.

Joe Torre would tell you to make sure you can hit the ball on the outside part of the plate.

You gotta keep the ball off the fat part of the bat.

Pitch me outside, I will hit .400. Pitch me inside, and you will not find the ball.

If a pitcher makes a mistake inside, I'm going to hit it.

Everybody believed you had to have a big piece of lumber and then muscle the ball over the fence. But by the time I and Hank Aaron - another guy who did it with his wrists - were through, there were a lot of guys ordering light bats and playing handball.

To this day, with all of these muscle-bound guys, nobody hit the ball further than Mickey Mantle, with his natural strength.

It's not a bad ball if I can hit it.

I've always loved hitting, and even as a kid, I always hit.

I kept listening in the minor leagues, and even earlier than that, people would say, 'If you don't hit the fastball, you're not going to get to the big leagues.' Every game, you're going to get a fastball.

I'm 5-foot-9, 180 pounds. I don't have much else to work with, so I just try to use my bat speed and get the most out of what I've got.

I'm pretty close to Miguel Cabrera. We are such different hitters, but at the same time, we're pretty close because we both like to hit the ball middle-away.