Baseball Quotes: Funny, Famous and Inspirational

Baseball is a game that's ripe for great quotes and sayings, whether they're funny, inspirational, or just famous ones that you've heard before. Join us as we run down some of the best baseball quotes and sayings in the history of America's favorite pastime. 

Best Baseball Quotes

• “You always get a special kick on Opening Day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.” — Joe DiMaggio

• “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.” – Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939, farewell address

• “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the gods.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti, former Commissioner of Baseball

Yogi-isms

• “It ain’t over til it’s over.” 
• “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” 
• “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” 
• “This is like deja vu all over again.” 
• “The future ain’t what it used to be.” 
• “If the fans don’t want to come out to the ballpark, no one can stop ’em.” 
• “You can observe a lot just by watching.” 
• “I never said most of the things I said.”
• “Little League baseball is a very good thing because it keeps the parents off the streets.”
• "When asked if some on-field streakers were men or women: “I don’t know. They had bags over their heads.”
• “It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
• “Never answer an anonymous letter.”
• “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”
• “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”
• “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
• “Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good, too.”
• “Slump? I ain’t in no slump. I just ain’t hitting.”
• "Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”

• “Somebody once asked me if I ever went up to the plate trying to hit a home run. I said, ‘Sure, every time.’” — Mickey Mantle

• “It was all I lived for, to play baseball.” – Mickey Mantle

• “The Yankees don’t pay me to win every day – just two out of three.” – Casey Stengel

• “There are three things you can do in a baseball game. You can win, or you can lose, or it can rain.” – Casey Stengel

• “Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.” – Casey Stengel

• “I won’t be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all.” — George Steinbrenner, upon buying the Yankees in 1973.

• “Where is it written that if you don’t get results right away, you fire people? What kind of asinine policy is that?” – George Steinbrenner, mocking himself in a skit on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in 1990

• “I’m the straw that stirs the drink.” – Reggie Jackson

• “A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was mine: to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.’” — Ted Williams

• “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” – Ted Williams
• “I don’t care about damn curses. Wake up the damn Bambino and have me face him. Maybe I’ll drill him in the ass, pardon me the word.” — Pedro Martinez, 2001

• “Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal.” – Pete Rose

• “Doctors tell me I have the body of a thirty year old. I know I have the brain of a fifteen year old. If you’ve got both, you can play baseball.” – Pete Rose

• “The key to winning baseball games is pitching, fundamentals, and three-run homers.” – Earl Weaver

• “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” – Rogers Hornsby

• “In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color, merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another’s.” – Ernie Harwell

• “Baseball players have such a bad rap of, like, we don’t work out or we’re not strong or this or that. Guys work so hard in baseball, it’s incredible. But people don’t know that.” — Bryce Harper

• “The thing I like about baseball is that it's one-on-one. You stand up there alone, and if you make a mistake, it's your mistake. If you hit a home run, it's your home run.” — Hank Aaron

• “If it wasn’t for baseball, I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.” — Babe Ruth

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