Batting Quotes - page 3
At any rate, it would detract sadly from the richness of the game if deduction of character from a player's style was a forbidden pursuit, for undoubtedly the main reason why cricketers are remembered for years, for decades, after the heroes of other sports are forgotten is that they set the impress of character, apart from technical batting or bowling, on the minds of those who watched them, and whether that cricket-character falsely represented the real man is, in the last analysis, unimportant.
Dudley Carew
Look, if you take the best batting team in the world, they too will have their weaknesses -- otherwise, wouldn't they win all the time? You mention any team to me, and I will pick out for you a dozen weaknesses. But that is not the point -- these things, like fielding, running between wickets, all these are technical things, they can be learnt and practised.
Kapil Dev
He insisted the other players allow me to take batting practice and he helped me. He put a bat behind my foot and made sure I didn't drag my foot. Willie Mays also helped me. He told me not to allow the pitchers to show me up. He suggested I get mean and if the pitchers knocked me down, get up and hit the ball. Show them.
Roberto Clemente
A kid copies what is good. I remember the first time I saw Lefty O'Doul, and he was as far away as those palms. And I saw the guy come to bat in batting practice. I was looking through a knothole, and I said, "Geez, does that guy look good!" And it was Lefty O'Doul, one of the greatest hitters ever.
Ted Williams
The best advice and most help he ever received came from Buster Clarkson, an American player, when he was in Puerto Rico."I played for his team and I was just a kid," Clemente recalled. "He insisted the other players allow me to take batting practice and he helped me. He put a bat behind my foot and made sure I didn't drag my foot. Willie Mays also helped me. He told me not to allow the pitchers to show me up. He suggested I get mean and if the pitchers knocked me down, get up and hit the ball. Show them."
Roberto Clemente
Dear Sirs: I feel compelled to write you concerning your article, "The World's Toughest Batting Orders-As Selected by Ten Star Major League Pitchers," which appeared in the March 31 Family Weekly. I think it is a shame that such unproven players such as Dave Concepcion are placed in a lineup of "toughest outs." I agree that Hank Aaron, Billy Williams, Rod Carew and Willie Stargell are among the greatest hitters the game has ever known, but it certainly did not take your panel long to forget Roberto Clemente.
Roberto Clemente
Roberto really should not have played that second game. He was so tired from the previous night's game and lack of sleep that he passed up batting practice. But he played all twenty-five innings within a twenty-hour period... Man, when I was playing, it would take me three or four weeks to get that many hits.
Roberto Clemente
The worse he felt physically, the better he seemed to play. He gave it 100% every day, every play. No one played the crazy right field in Pittsburgh better. I think my favorite quote from him came when Bobby Bragan asked him why he didn't find one batting stance and stick with it. Bob replied, "Bobby, it don't matter how you stand, it matter where you end up!”.
Roberto Clemente
I also threw the slider a couple of times. I threw the slider to Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente, because I figured if it worked on those two great hitters, then I had something there. So I threw it to Aaron and almost hit him in the face. He reached out to get it, and it came right at him. And I threw it to Clemente. You may remember that in Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, there was a light tower by where they used to park the batting cage. Halfway up. there was a bunch of transformers. Well, Clemente hit it off a transformer. I said, "Well, maybe I don't have a slider," and I gave it up.So, I never came up with a third pitch.
Roberto Clemente
A right-handed batter, Clemente hit the ball to the opposite field harder than most left-handed pull-hitters could. He didn't achieve the home run totals of Mays or Aaron, but he played most of his career in Forbes Field, a terrible park for homers. I remember the center field at Forbes being so deep that the grounds crew would store the batting cage out in its farthest reaches during games!
Roberto Clemente
Although the pair by the Phils did the most damage, the inside-the-park job by Roberto Clemente in the first inning was the most thrilling. [...] Clemente greeted Haddix with a line drive that gathered momentum as it approached Ashburn and took off over his head and ricocheted off the wall toward the batting cage. By the time Ashburn picked up the ball, Clemente was at third base and he made it to the plate without trouble. The hit provoked an argument between the Phillies and the umpires because the ball rolled under the batting cage but the Phils were told there was no ground rule to cover the situation.
Roberto Clemente
Dick Stuart, who hit an estimated 500-foot homer over the left field scoreboard in Pittsburgh, has a rival in Roberto Clemente. The Puerto Rican outfielder of the Pirates made the Cubs sit up and take notice when he drilled a homer off southpaw Bill Henry in Chicago in the May 17 nightcap that left Wrigley Field via the left-center corner of the bleachers. Wrigley Field observers rated it at probably 500 feet. Rogers Hornsby, the Cubs batting coach, said it was the longest he ever witnessed and [manager] Bob Scheffing agreed it was No. 1 in his book.
Roberto Clemente
Dick Stuart took a look at Roberto Clemente slashing line drives one day and made a pertinent observation. "There must be the best 169-pound slugger in baseball,” Stuart said of the Pirate right fielder. Clemente lost some weight during the winter in his native Puerto Rico and never has been able to regain it. But he hasn't lost his fierce swing... He was leading the Pirates not only in batting but also in RBIs with 23, and of his three homers, two went to right field, indicating his power to all fields. Clemente slammed a homer into the right field stands in Pittsburgh [on May 9th] and also performed the novel feat of drilling one over the right field wall in Philadelphia [on May 19th].
Roberto Clemente
At Terry Field, the fine new training headquarters of the Pittsburgh club, one may see [, among others,] Roberto Walker Clemente, a teammate of Willie Mays in the Puerto Rican League, who has copied Mays' method of catching the ball against his navel but, alackaday, not his batting.
Roberto Clemente
He was a perfectionist, like a great artist in any field. When he got to a new park, he inspected every inch of right field to see if the ground was hard or soft, how high the grass was. He was a fanatic about his waistline. Once he told me, "I have a 32-inch waist always; when I'm a bit more, I'm no good." In the off-season, I've seen him go to a field in Carolina with a sack full of beer bottle caps. He'd get some kids to throw him the tiny caps and he'd spend hours – hours! – batting. Then, for exercise, he'd bend down and pick them all up. He said that when he was done hitting those tiny caps, a real ball looked as big as a coconut!
Roberto Clemente
