“It never hurts to apologize, especially if you don't mean it.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“The older they get, the better they get when they were younger”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“I can still remember Pete Rose, on the top step of the dugout screaming, “Fuck you, Shakespeare.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“I think I should be allowed to be only fair, or even mediocre, for a while.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“Front offices are more interested in players that are far than players that are near.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“Has anybody noticed that we haven’t won a game since we ate that chicken á la king?”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“Religion is like baseball,” said Steve. “Great game, bad owners.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“The author relates that Mickey Mantle did not expect to play one day and showed up extremely hung over. He was nevertheless called on to pitch and smashed a towering home run to an enthusiastic ovation. He related to his teammates, "Those people don't know how tough that was.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“The pitching coach was bugged by the author's technique because he had never seen anyone do it before, and besides, it wasn't the coach's idea.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“Don’t ever think $7,000 isn’t a lot of money in baseball. I’ve had huge arguments over a lot less.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“High school games would just as big a deal to me as any major league game.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
“Doubleday’s First Law, which states that if you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“Before the first workout, Joe Schultz, the manager (he’s out of the old school, I think, because he looks like he’s out of the old school—short, portly, bald, ruddy-faced, twinkly eyed), stopped by while I was having a catch. “How you feeling, Jim?” he asked. I wonder what he meant by that.”
― Jim Bouton, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Ball Four
“The author emphasizes the importance of self-forgetfulness when his statistics were marred by a bad outing. He forgot all of that outing to such an extent that he quipped, "What was my name?”
― Jim Bouton, quote from Ball Four
Jim Bouton
Born place: in Newark, New Jersey, The United States
Born date March 8, 1939
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“However, often when fatal things are happening, you don't know at the time that they're fatal. You get an inkling that they're Not Good, that they Haven't Helped, but only the passage of time will reveal just how bad they are.”
― Marian Keyes, quote from Angels
“It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
“Si j'étais le soleil, je chercherais un autre endroit pour illuminer, un endroit où les gens n'utiliseraient pas ma lumière pour faire des choses horribles.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, quote from Beasts of No Nation
“We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
“Not to discuss with a man worthy of conversation is to waste the man. To discuss with a man not worthy of conversation is to waste words. The wise waste neither men nor words.”
― Confucius, quote from The Analects
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