Baseball Motivational Quotes

Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game!

Champions never sleep, the eternal spirit keep them alert and awake.

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.

It is not over. Champions extend their limits and make things happen.

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.

Worrying about things you can't control is a waste both on the baseball field and in life.

Discouraged? As I was driving home from work one day, I stopped to watch a local Little League baseball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first-baseline, I asked one of the boys what the score was. "We’re behind 14 to nothing,” he answered with a smile. “Really,” I said. “I have to say you don’t look very discouraged.” “Discouraged?” the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face. “Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t been up to bat yet.

Hungry? Thirsty? Tired and need a place to lay your head? Need your shoe tied? A book read? A ride to baseball? New sheets for your dorm? A babysitter for your kids? A quiet cup of tea? Do you need help navigating a problem? A heartache? A loss? Celebrating a win? Want motivation? Validation? To be challenged? To be held? To be loved? Call a mom.

In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.

I like my players to be married and in debt. That's the way you motivate them.

At least these cretins knew fear, one of the two great motives for belief. The question the baseball bat would not resolve was whether they knew the other motive, love, which, for some reason, was much harder to teach. (247)

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens—think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.

Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

I have long been fascinated with the human condition, the ability we have to face enormous struggles and come through them, often, the stronger for it. I have seen it over and over again in the people I’ve worked with. Resilience humbles me. We are stronger than we know.” "I was drawn to the sense of belonging in baseball. The notion that you were all in it together. Baseball depended on all nine guys doing their job. My mother raised us the same way. We were a team. We won or lost together." from The Cardinal Club - A Daughter's Journey to Acceptance

Myron stopped at a red light. He was close, so goddamn close. TC was helping Greg hide; he was sure of it. But of course, TC was only part of the solution. None of this answered the central question in all this: Who killed Liz Gorman? He put his mind on rewind and reviewed the night of the murder. He thought about Clip being the first of the three to arrive. In many ways, Clip was now his best suspect. But Myron still saw big problems with that scenario. What was Clip’s motive, for example? Yes, Liz Gorman’s information may have been detrimental to the team. The information may have even been potent enough for him to lose the vote. But would Clip pick up a baseball bat and murder a woman over that? People kill for money and power all the time. Would Clip? But

So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.

There was a time when the [National baseball]League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport. Today its eyes are on the turnstile. Men have come into the business for no other motive than to exploit it for every dollar in sight. Brotherhood Manifesto, November 1889

Imagine how things would change in major-league baseball if all the bonus money for winning the World Series were given to the team’s manager and owner instead of the players. The players’ motivation level would fall to less than zero.

If one person can change the opinion of just two people, it can eventually turn into a tsunami, where a once popular opinion is rendered obsolete.

In the end, we have to understand that being progressive means that you are leading from the front, not pushing from the back. You cannot worry about what people say and do if you truly want to make a real impact. You may never see your impact directly, but if you fight to make it happen you will have a chance at success.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it. -Al Lopez (1908 – 2005)

When life throws you a curveball, hit out of the park.

There are varying motivations for becoming a professional athlete, from the money to the fame to the women to the drive to the competition. But on this night at this singular moment the Mets remembered what it was like to do something for pure love. They had accomplished the baseball impossible, and the result was euphoria.

Baseball’s owners could have exerted their clout on the players’ union to agree to testing, but every time the issue was raised, the union said it was a violation of players’ privacy and sealed off further discussion. The owners may have had their own motivations to let the problem continue to escalate. In the late 1990s, the owners—desperate to reclaim