Ty Cobb Quotes

When I played ball, I didn't play for fun. . . . It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

Walter Johnson's fastball looked about the size of a watermelon seed and it hissed at you as it passed.

A ball bat is a wondrous weapon.

Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

I never could stand losing. Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly.

The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it.

When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.

I may have been fierce, but never low or underhand.

The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy windup and then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him... Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.

I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

He batted against spitballs, shineballs, emeryballs and all the other trick deliveries. He never figured anything out or studied anything with the same scientific approach I gave it. He just swung. If he'd ever had any knowledge of batting, his average would have been phenomenal. ... he seemed content to just punch the ball, and I can still see those line drives whistling to the far precincts. Joe Jackson hit the ball harder than any man ever to play baseball.

No man has ever been a perfect ballplayer. Stan Musial, however, is the closest to being perfect in the game today.

The longer I live, the longer I realize that batting is more a mental matter than it is physical. The ability to grasp the bat, swing at the proper time, take a proper stance; all these are elemental. Batting is rather a study in psychology, a sizing up of a pitcher and catcher and observing little details that are of immense importance. It's like the study of crime, the work of a detective as he picks up clues.

The base paths belonged to me, the runner. The rules gave me the right. I always went into a bag full speed, feet first. I had sharp spikes on my shoes. If the baseman stood where he had no business to be and got hurt, that was his fault.

The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves.

I have observed that baseball is not unlike war, and when you get right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.

The most important part of a player's body is above his shoulders.

When two doctors pass each other on the street they wink at each other.

Baseball was one-hundred percent of my life.

I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

Speed is a great asset; but it's greater when it's combined with quickness - and there's a big difference.

Just speed, raw speed, blinding speed, too much speed.

The best recommendation for an umpire in the old days was: "He licked somebody in the Three-I League. He ought to do.

To get along with me, don't increase my tension.

The crowd makes the ballgame.

The way those clubs shift against Ted Williams, I can't understand how he can be so stupid not to accept the challenge to him and hit to left field.

I'm coming down on the next pitch, Krauthead.

Every man in the game, from the minors on up, is not only fighting against the other side, but he's trying to hold onto his own job against those on his own bench who'd love to take it away. Why deny this? Why minimize it? Why not boldly admit it?

I've been called one of the hardest bargainers who ever held out, and I'm proud of it.

When I played ball, I didn't play for fun.

That boy Mantle is a good one.

Most collisions out on the fields are needless.

I've got to be first. ALL the time.

Don't come home a failure.

He (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was the finest natural hitter in the history of the game.

When I came to Detroit I was just a mild-mannered Sunday-school boy.