Hitter Quotes
In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence [...]. Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?
Stephen Jay Gould
Well, I had tried out a few schemes of my own, until one day I began to watch Joe Jackson. He looked to me about the freest, longest hitter I had seen anywhere. He could take a good, natural cut at the ball without losing his balance and when he landed the ball usually kept going until it disappeared. If you will remember, he was the first to hit one over the right field stands at the Polo Grounds. So I said to myself: If that style works so well with Jackson, why not for me? And I began keeping my right foot well forward and my left foot well back. In the first place, being a left-handed hitter, this gave me a chance to get in a lot of leverage and to get my full weight back of the punch. It brought my body around in a half turn and as I stepped into the ball with my right foot I was turning in a natural way in the same direction my bat was traveling. I tried this idea out; it worked great-and I've stuck to it ever since.
Babe Ruth
He was my favorite hitter. He could do almost anything he wanted to do at bat. He was a scientific hitter. I've seen him deliberately go for the home run late in a game and get it. Even if it meant pulling an outside pitch, he'd pull because he'd made up his mind to do it. Another thing I liked about him was the power he generated when he hit the ball between the infielders. This is a sure sign of a great hitter.
Hank Aaron
Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution. The mental aspects of hitting were especially important to me. I was strictly a guess hitter, which meant I had to have a thorough knowledge of every pitcher I came up against and develop a strategy for hitting him. My method was to identify the pitches a certain pitcher had and eliminate all but one or two and then wait for them. One advantage I had was quick wrists. Another advantage - and one that all good hitters have - was my eyesight. Sometimes I could read the pitcher's grip on the ball before he ever released it and be able to tell what pitch he was throwing. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
Hank Aaron
Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg's Myth. Not because his writings were exceptionally profound, difficult to comprehend or emotionally overwhelming, but because Clemens hammered on my head with the book for minutes on end. (Clemens and Weser were the principal torturers of the Jews in Dresden, and they were generally differentiated as the Hitter and the Spitter.) ‘How dare a Jewish pig like you presume to read a book of this kind?' Clemens yelled. To him it seemed like the desecration of a consecrated wafer. ‘How dare you have a book here from the lending library?' Only the fact that the volume had demonstrably been borrowed in the name of my Aryan wife, and, moreover, that the sheet of notes which accompanied it was torn up without being deciphered, saved me at the time from the concentration camp.
Victor Klemperer
I listened to the San Juan games on the radio and my idol was Monte Irvin, because he not only was a good hitter but had a very good arm. Even my friends called me Monte Irvin as a nickname. I never thought I'd be good enough to play pro ball. I always felt you had to be like Superman to play professionally. But in 1952, at age 17, I signed a contract with Santurce. My bonus? It was $500 and one glove. They also paid me $30 a week. Two years later – when I was 19 – there were eight or nine big league teams after me and I signed with the Dodgers for a $10,000 bonus. This was a big day in my life.
Roberto Clemente