Willie Mays Quotes

When I went to Brooklyn in 1948 Jackie Robinson was at the height of his brilliant career.

Mine was an easy ride compared to Jackie Robinson's.

I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

I guess what really made me a Dodgers fan from the beginning was that the team had Jackie Robinson, the first 'Negro' in the major leagues.

In 1949, I saw a World War II veteran named Lou Brissie, who had nearly lost a lower leg in combat, pitch in the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.

As much as I loved Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam, and Don Newcombe, I loved watching Willie Mays play more than all of them combined, even if he played for the 'bad guys!'

After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.

Robinson was important to all blacks. To make it into the majors and to take all the name calling, he had to be something special. He had to take all this for years, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for the nation.

As I look out there and see the culture of baseball, a lot of blacks and Latins, it's given me a lot of joy to know that Jackie started that. If Jackie hadn't come in '47, me and Ron Santo wouldn't have played in Double-A and all those years in the big leagues.

All though I didn't meet him. His legend and his saga and his story is just that. Jackie Robinson, we all have to tip our hat to him. Because he made the game available to guys like me.

Were it not for Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey would be remembered, if at all, as a Bible-thumping midwestern Methodist windbag who neither played baseball on Sundays when he was a mediocre catcher for the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, nor attended games on the Sabbath as a baseball executive.

It was a breaking period for black people coming into baseball, and how many followed depended on Jackie's conduct. But that's not the case now. What and how I do doesn't mean nearly as much as what and how Jackie did.

Babe Ruth, what can you say? You are almost speechless when people put your name alongside his name. I wish I can go back in time in meet him. Obviously, he was probably the most important sports figure in the world at that time. Hopefully, someday when I pass away, I get to meet him, and then I can really find out what he was really like.

I don't want people to forget Babe Ruth. I just want them to remember Henry Aaron.

I cannot but feel that the one man, above all others, who deserves the eternal thanks of his own race, and all thinking people, for bringing about baseball’s greatest reform, is Jackie Robinson himself…Certainly baseball people should be eternally grateful for the contribution he made to his own people, and to the game.

Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.

Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the pages of the history of American times than has that of Ty Cobb... he seems to have understood that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.

[Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television.

Do you know the nicest thing about looking at pictures of a 1950's baseball park? The only people wearing baseball caps are the players.

I can't believe that Babe Ruth was a better player than Willie Mays. (Babe) Ruth is to baseball what Arnold Palmer is to golf. He got the game moving. But I can't believe he could run as well as (Willie) Mays, and I can't believe he was any better an outfielder.

There is an incredible film, 42. It's the incredible story of Jackie Robinson. I have extolled the virtues of this movie to everyone I meet. I've given quotes to everyone I talk to.

We used to have an all-Black baseball team, all Black stars and when White folks took Jackie Robinson and brought him into the major league that was the beginning of the crushing of Black baseball teams and leagues.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.