Quotes by Jim Bouton

“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.”

“Forget goals. Value the process.”

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

“Back then, if you had a sore arm, the only people concerned were you and your wife. Now its you, your wife, your agent, your investment counselor, your stockbroker, and your publisher.”

“Ball Four”

“Throw him low smoke and well go pound some Budweiser.”

“It goes back to the old concept of town teams — your guys: the mailman, the milkman, you know, the carpenter, the plumber. The popularity of vintage baseball will thrive on the backlash against the corporate, over-hyped, over-sold Major League Baseball.”

“We broke in together in 1959. You never know who will make it.”

“The fans are going to get quite a show. This is theater and this is living history, but its also unscripted sports competition. Its not like a Civil War re-enactment. Its a real ballgame.”

“Most players saw amphetamines as harmless. But the professional athlete does a lot of things to his body that they dont think of as harmful.”

“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyones task is unique as his specific opportunity.”

“Goals that are not written down are just wishes.”

“Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.”

“They should have done something a long time ago. The players who arent taking drugs need to be protected from the ones taking them.... Youve said to the public, Lets ignore it until the absolute last minute. Now, everybody suffers, even the guy whos not taking anything.”

I think I should be allowed to be only fair, or even mediocre, for a while.

The author says his young son, adopted from South Korea, occasionally burps and says thank you but otherwise is doing all right.

The pitching coach was bugged by the authors technique because he had never seen anyone do it before, and besides, it wasnt the coachs idea.

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?

Front offices are more interested in players that are far than players that are near.

The older they get, the better they get when they were younger