It's a good likeness of The Dutchman. It's perfect the way they have him holding a bat in his big hands. He was good with the bat but he was a terror with that glove, too. And my, how he could run the bases. Come to think of it, he was as good a ball player as I ever saw. Maybe the best. John McGraw always said Wagner was the greatest and I'm inclined to agree with him. He was certainly the best I ever played against. Wagner was a huge man with huge hands. He could cover ground and he could throw. Amazing thing about him was his arm. It was only as good as the runner. If you were an average runner, he'd just beat you with his throw. And if you were fast, he'd just beat you again.
Casey StengelRelated topics
arm average ball base bat beat best big cover dutchman fast glove good ground holding john likeness man maybe perfect player run runner saw say terror thing think throw way mcgraw handsRelated quotes
I had a chance to sign him before the Dodgers gave him a bonus. I offered the kid $4,000 to sign with our club, and told him we would send him to an A league. The money meant more to him and we weren't taking on any more bonus players. He can do everything, run, throw and hit. He's a bit crude in some things he does, but that's to be expected. I doubt very much if he can play regularly in the majors this year. But you can't tell. He faced some good pitching in Puerto Rico in 1953 and batted .300. Right now, he is far above that figure. The main thing is to hope he can stay relaxed and loose when he gets to the big leagues. If the kid doesn't tighten up, maybe the Pirates will have a good ball player on their hands.
Roberto Clemente
Now it was Liddle, jerking into motion as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping in to Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I have ever seen ball hit, on a high line to dead center field. For whatever it is worth, I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.
Arnold Hano
Warning. It is usual to read into the law of large numbers things which it definitely does not imply. If Peter and Paul toss a perfect coin 10,000 times, it is customary to expect that Peter will be in the lead roughly half the time. This is not true. In a large number of different coin-tossing games it is reasonable to expect that any fixed moment heads will be in the lead in roughly half of all cases. But it is quiet likely that the player who ends at the winning side has been in the lead for practically the whole duration of the game. Thus, contrary to widespread belief, the time average for any individual game has nothing to do with the ensemble average at any given moment.
William Feller
You obviously never saw Wilt Chamberlain play who undoubtedly was the greatest scorer this game has ever known. When did MJ ever average 50.4 points per game plus 25.7 rebounds? (Wilt in the 1962 season when blocked shot statistics were not kept). We will never accurately know how many shots Wilt blocked. Oh, by the way in 1967 and 68, Wilt was a league leader in assists. Did MJ ever score 100 points in a game? How many times did MJ score more than 60 points in a game? MJ led the league in scoring in consecutive seasons for 10 years but he did this in an NBA that eventually expanded into 30 teams vs. when Wilt played and there were only 8 teams.
Wilt Chamberlain
John F. Kennedy ... murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.
Hunter S. Thompson
