A manager should stay as far away as possible from his players. I don't know if I said ten words to Frank Robinson while he played for me.
And then after that, running around the bases, it was just one of those things. You couldn't believe what happened to you. And I look back on it, it's almost like it happened to somebody else.
Sometimes I felt I got caught up kind of going into the clubhouse non-chalantly sometimes, because all of the other guys in the clubhouse didn't go there with one goal in mind.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
They told me my services were no longer desired because they wanted to put in a youth program as an advance way of keeping the club going. I'll never make the mistake of being seventy again.
I came in here and a fella asked me to have a drink. I said I don't drink. Then another fella said hear you and Joe DiMaggio aren't speaking and I said I'll take that drink.
One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures.
I know the Hall of Fame is the more sought-after thing. But I'm getting a bigger charge out of my uniform number being put away. Everything I worked hard for and wished for came true.
The more that Japanese players go to the big leagues to play and succeed, the more that will serve to inspire young kids in Japan to want to become baseball players when they grow up.
You can't worry if it's cold; you can't worry if it's hot; you only worry if you get sick. Because then if you don't get well, you die.
A lot of people write books not at the end of their career. Why you gotta wait until then? When you're momentum's going, that's when people really want to get to know about you.
Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
I lull them into a false sense of security by watching me pitch... If overconfidence can cause the Roman Empire to fall, I ought to be able to get a ground ball.
Coming into a game in the eighth or ninth inning is like parachuting behind enemy lines. And sometimes the chute doesn't open. You have to live with that. It's an occupational hazard.
If some guys couldn't stand the heat, then they didn't belong in the major leagues. I don't know anybody who refused the World Series checks I helped them get.
There were times when I'd bench players for their lack of effort. We worked very hard on fundamentals, which was the Dodger way. We needed to be more aggressive.
And I tell you that's one of the reasons why I didn't have the friendships with the media, maybe like I could have. But I had to do what I had to do to make myself successful.
My father loved baseball and he cultivated my talent. I don't think he ever had any doubt in his mind that I would play professional baseball someday.
The soldiers that didn't come back were the heroes. It's a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you're a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you're a survivor.
Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.
I think I play center field better than I do anywhere else. I have enough speed and enough reaction to know where the ball goes off the bat.
