Brooks Robinson Quotes

When I was real young I wanted to play baseball. I really loved playing center field, but that was never anything I was really ever that good at. I played up until I was in ninth grade.

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.

It would be useless for any player to attempt to explain successful batting.

People who write about spring training not being necessary have never tried to throw a baseball.

I used to lead off when I was a rookie. I've always been able to bunt.

I was supposed to be too short to play college volleyball.

I don't need to practice my swing. I grew up with a bat in my hands.

I think that, because of the way I catch, that I'm one of the best catchers to have ever played baseball.

I know I can hit. My defense has been there. I'm trying to show what I can do on the basepaths as well.

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.

That's one thing I learned from watching great hitters hit. A lot of hitters, they're ready to hit from pitch one.

Hitting's the hardest thing to do in sports.

I was able to play alongside, in my opinion, the best hitter with Miguel Cabrera and kind of watch the way he goes about it and the way he looks at situations, when to try to drive a ball versus when to shoot a ball.

If I knew exactly what I know now and had it to do over, I'd be a switch hitter. No telling what I could have done.

The one unbreakable rule about hitting is this: if a batter hits well with his own particular stance and swing, think twice - or more - before suggesting a change.

The hardest thing to do in baseball is to hit a round baseball with a round bat, squarely.

Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.

You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.

I hated to fight all the time just to enjoy my day. Fighting wasn't the kind of thing that I enjoyed, but I grew to enjoy it because I did it so long.

I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.

I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.

One of my greatest struggles is, and has been for a long time, seeing unkindness on this planet. Unkindness and inconsideration. I try to help that by being more conscientious and helpful towards our fellow brothers and sisters.

If things were half as bad as some people persist in believing, I'd have retired with a bottle of Scotch and a pistol a long time ago.

As I became a creature of the empty tunnels, survival became easier and more difficult all at once. I gained in the physical skills and experience necessary to live on. I could defeat almost anything that wandered into my chosen domain. It did not take me long, however, to discover one nemesis that I could neither defeat nor flee. It followed me wherever I went - indeed, the farther I ran, the more it closed in around me. My enemy was solitude, the interminable, incessant silence of hushed corridors.

It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.