Jim Bouton > Quotes

“Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field? ”
― Jim Bouton

“A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
― Jim Bouton

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
― Jim Bouton

“It never hurts to apologize, especially if you don't mean it.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I can still remember Pete Rose, on the top step of the dugout screaming, “Fuck you, Shakespeare.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Pete Rose gets banned for life for gambling while the drug addicts are allowed back after a year; and then they get extra chances after that. Baseball is saying, in effect, that gambling is worse than drugs. How do kids make sense out of that?”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The day he is out of baseball will be the day he starts to think about what comes next. By then, it may be too late.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The older they get, the better they get when they were younger”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The only member of the team nobody liked was our 6 o’clock sports guy, a fellow named Howard Cosell. “Monday Night Football” was just getting started and Howard was annoyed at having to be on the same news with mere local personalities, whom he would attack on the air. This was a mistake in the case of Roger Grimsby who was a lot sharper and even more devastating than Cosell, in his own way. I remember one night, at the end of his report, Howard went into a sarcastic putdown of Grimsby that lasted for what seemed like two minutes. Finally, when Howard was finished, the camera switched to Grimsby who was sitting there with his eyes closed, snoring.”
― Jim Bouton

“Religion is like baseball,” said Steve. “Great game, bad owners.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“And I don’t like the Mantle who refused to sign baseballs in the clubhouse before the games. Everybody else had to sign, but Little Pete forged Mantle’s signature. So there are thousands of baseballs around the country that have been signed not by Mickey Mantle, but by Pete Previte.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn’t they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old. Doug”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I think I should be allowed to be only fair, or even mediocre, for a while.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Gary Bell is nicknamed Ding Dong. Of course. What’s interesting about it is that “Ding Dong” is what the guys holler when somebody gets hit in the cup. The cups are metal inserts that fit inside the jock strap, and when a baseball hits one it’s called ringing the bell, which rhymes with hell, which is what it hurts like. It’s funny, even if you’re in the outfield, or in the dugout, no matter how far away, when a guy gets it in the cup you can hear it. Ding Dong.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“We agreed we’re both troubled by the stiff-minded emphasis on the flag that grips much of the country these days. A flag, after all, is still only a cloth symbol. You don’t show patriotism by showing blank-eyed love for a bit of cloth. And you can be deeply patriotic without covering your car with flag decals.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Has anybody noticed that we haven’t won a game since we ate that chicken á la king?”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“He has two different hairpieces.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“There’s pettiness in baseball, and meanness and stupidity beyond belief, and everything else bad that you’ll find outside of baseball.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“A young girl asked one of the guys in the bullpen if he was married. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not a fanatic about it.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Being a professional athlete allows you to postpone your adulthood. You grow up in Hero World. Parents change the dinner schedule for you, teachers help with grades, coaches fawn over you, cops ask for an autograph and someone else buys the drinks. Or worse. As basketball great Bill Russell put it, “most professional athletes have been on scholarship since the third grade.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“So I’ve been tempted sometimes to say into a microphone that I feel I won tonight because I don’t believe in God. I mean, just for the sake of balance, to let the kids know that belief in a deity or “Pitching for the Master” is not one of the criteria for major-league success. But I guess I never will.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The world doesn’t want to hear about labor pains,” Johnny Sain used to say. “It only wants to see the baby.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I’m not sure I’m going to like Don Mincher. I keep hearing that big southern accent of his. It’s prejudice, I know, but every time I hear a southern accent I think: stupid. A picture of George Wallace pops into my mind. It’s like Lenny Bruce saying he could never associate a nuclear scientist with a southern accent.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Television executives would want to rewrite Gone With The Wind. If they had The Old Man and The Sea, they’d say to the author, “Ernie, we love it. But the part about the fish is boring. And the man is too old. He should have a girlfriend.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Sheldon Kopp, the author and psychologist, wrote, “There are no great men. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Greg Goossen was doing his Casey Stengel imitation and he remembered the best thing the old man ever said about him. “We got a kid here named Goossen, twenty years old, and in ten years he’s got a chance to be thirty.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I guess to really like baseball as a fan you’ve got to have some Richard Nixon in you.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The author says his young son, adopted from South Korea, occasionally burps and says thank you but otherwise is doing all right.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“What could be better than a Fourth of July doubleheader in Kansas City? Anything up to and including a kick in the ass.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“When I approached him a second time with the cameras rolling, Munson grabbed the microphone and suggested I perform a physical impossibility.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four