Carl Yastrzemski Quotes

If this validates anything, it's that learning how to bunt and hit and run and turning two is more important than knowing where to find the little red light at the dug out camera.

You would be amazed how many important outs you can get by working the count down to where the hitter is sure you're going to throw to his weakness, and then throw to his power instead.

I don't believe there's a baseball job that I couldn't take care of.

I always tried to watch the pitcher and his complete windup from the moment he had the ball in his glove all the way through his motion, and tried to follow it all the way out of his hand, all the way to home plate.

Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80% of being a successful hitter. The other 20% is just execution.

'Get up and hit a home run,' has never been a part of the usable technique of any manager.

There are really smart baseball players. It's a thinking person's game.

You can't go up there trying to get hits. You can just go up there trying to put together at-bats and square the baseball up.

I came to love Fenway. It was a place that rejuvenated me after a road trip; the fans right on top of you, the nutty angles. And the Wall. That was my baby, the left-field wall, the Green Monster.

Whenever I hit a ball in the gap, I'm thinking the extra bases. I never slow down. That's the only way you're going to get triples.

I'm seeing the ball well. I'm not trying for home runs. I'm trying to hit to right field more. When I do that, the home run comes.

All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

In the World Series, when a pitcher's not doing his job, they put another one in that can.

I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven't asked for anything in return. The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they're slitting your throat.

There is no defense against the base on balls.

Nicky looked down at me with a knowledge on his face that he was holding the monster in his arms. I'd have comforted him, but it would have been all lies.

One day he [Wagner] was batting against a young pitcher who had just come into the league. The catcher was a kid, too . The pitcher threw Honus a curve ball, and he swung at it and missed and fell down. Looked helpless as a robin. I was kind of surprised, but the guy sitting next to me poked me in the ribs and said, 'Watch this next one.' Those kids figured they had the old man's weakness, you see, and served him up the same dish - as he knew they would. Well, Honus hit a line drive so hard the fence in left field went back and forth for five minutes.

I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.

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

The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.

The baselines belongs to the runner, and whenever I was running the bases, I always slid hard. I wanted infielders to have that instant's hesitation about coming across the bag at second or about standing in there awaiting a throw to make a tag. There are only 27 outs in a ballgame, and it was my job to save one for my team every time I possibly could.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

About a veteran player thrown out trying to steal second: There was larceny in his heart, but his legs were honest.

She was tired of being told how it was by this generation, who’d botched things so badly. They’d sold their children a pack of lies: God and country. Love your parents. All is fair. And then they’d sent those boys, her brother, off to fight a great monster of a war that maimed and killed and destroyed whatever was inside them. Still they lied, expecting her to mouth the words and play along. Well, she wouldn’t. She knew now that the world was a long way from fair. She knew the monsters were real.