Mickey Mantle Quotes

A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide.

If I had known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself!

After I hit a home run I had a habit of running the bases with my head down. I figured the pitcher already felt bad enough without me showing him up rounding the bases.

My instinct is a winning coach, and when it said "Batter up,"I didn't argue that I wasn't ready for the game. I gripped the bat in both hands, assumed the stance, and said a prayer to Mickey Mantle.

Somebody once asked me if I ever went up to the plate trying to hit a home run. I said "sure, every time".

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

I never saw it before. I see it all now. All of it. It’s never Mickey Mantle that kills you. Never Willie Mays. Never the thing you prepare for. It’s always the little thing you didn’t see coming. The head cold that puts you in your grave. It’s always Bucky Dent.” Ted

If I knew I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

New York Yankees: Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Bobby Richardson, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford. The Yankees were playing the San Francisco Giants in the 1962 World Series.

You never have to wait long, or look far, to be reminded of how thin the line is between being a hero or a goat.

I'll play baseball for the Army or fight for it, whatever they want me to do.

And I don’t like the Mantle who refused to sign baseballs in the clubhouse before the games. Everybody else had to sign, but Little Pete forged Mantle’s signature. So there are thousands of baseballs around the country that have been signed not by Mickey Mantle, but by Pete Previte.

It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life.

In his time, Hornsby was an unbelievable hitter who three times finished with an average of over .400, reaching .424 in 1924, a record still standing. This background has not made him exactly tolerant of the ability of baseball players. To illustrate, we reprint herewith the most glowing report on an individual which Hornsby handed in all season: LOOKS LIKE A MAJOR-LEAGUE PLAYER The name at the top of the sheet said the report was about Mickey Mantle.

When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, 'Don't be like me.' The transformation of The Mick parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours.

Keynesian argument that wage earners consume a greater proportion of their income than landlords or entrepreneurs, and therefore that a decreased total wage bill is a calamity because consumption will decline and savings increase. In the first place, this is not always accurate. It assumes (1) that the laborers are the relatively “poor” and the nonlaborers the relative “rich,” and (2) that the poor consume a greater proportion of their income than the rich. The first assumption is not necessarily correct. The President of General Motors is, after all, a “laborer,” and so also is Mickey Mantle; on the other hand, there are a great many poor landlords, farmers, and retailers. Manipulating relations between wage earners and others is a very clumsy and ineffective way of manipulating relations between poor and rich (provided we desire any manipulation at all). The second assumption is often, but not necessarily, true, as we have seen above. As we have also seen, however, the empirical study of Lubell indicates that a redistribution of income between rich and poor may not appreciably affect the social consumption–saving proportions. But suppose that all these objections are waved aside for the moment, and we concede for the sake of argument that a fall in total payroll will shift the social proportion against consumption and in favor of saving. What then? But this is precisely an effect that we should highly prize. For, as we have seen, any shift in social time preferences in favor of saving and against consumption will speed the advent of recovery, and decrease the need for a lengthy period of depression readjustment. Any such shift from consumption to savings will foster recovery. To the extent that this dreaded fall in consumption does result from a cut in wage rates, then, the depression will be cured that much more rapidly.

If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” - baseball legend Mickey Mantle

Speaking of baseball, a small group of Nautilus crew members arrived during a game at Yankee Stadium. Even though the famous slugger Mickey Mantle was at bat, the crowd stood and gave the submariners a standing ovation.

It turns out that Mantle was an indifferent student of his own career. In that regard he was like his teammate Yogi Berra, who once commented, “I never said most of the things I said.”5

More than other sports, baseball, Halberstam observed, depends on statistics because they give meaning to the game’s mythology. A player’s “performance is not fulfilling enough,” he wrote. “It must be shown in quantified heroics, records to be set and broken, new myths and heroes to replace the old.”9

To write a book about Mickey Mantle and not to show people who he really was doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. So I decided the only way to do this is call it a novel and plow full-speed ahead as to what my interpretation and my estimation of who he was and what was troubling him. This is a very complicated book. It’s hardly just about sex.

Managers must cultivate a software development culture built upon solid development practices, or programming projects will likely fail.

Since then, Roberto has collected women as he once collected baseball cards, always preferring quantity to quality: in grade school he once traded Mickey Mantle to Fred for three obscure and inept Red Sox. It is his contention that the world is full of good-looking horny women who are interested in a no-strings relationship.

Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

I developed an interest in major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I’m concerned (with a nod to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan. They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New York than Boston, and that’s where our loyalties went. And what was not to love? The Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond.

The author relates that Mickey Mantle did not expect to play one day and showed up extremely hung over. He was nevertheless called on to pitch and smashed a towering home run to an enthusiastic ovation. He related to his teammates, "Those people don't know how tough that was.

But suddenly, he was firmly resolved about declining the UCLA alternative. A little while before, there had been a storm of controversy about Mickey Mantle and the kind of priority treatment he had received. DeForest suspected he was getting the celebrity treatment, that he might in effect take someone else’s opportunity to live longer. In the end, he refused all treatment short of the medication designed to slow the growth of his cancer and the drugs for the pain.

    5.  Unfair to Animals                    6.  Unfair to Muledom THE HALF-PENNANT PORCH Finley was obsessed with the Yankees and attributed their success to the short distance to the right field fence in Yankee Stadium. He believed sluggers who batted left-handed, like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris, had an unfair advantage. The fence was the sole reason the Yankees were winners. Before the 1964 season, Finley sought to create his own advantage. He moved his right field fence so that it was 296 feet from home plate and called it his “Pennant Porch.” The commissioner forced Finley to change it to 325 feet.

During my eighteen years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. —MICKEY MANTLE I

the window for hours. He wouldn't talk to anyone. The players whispered that Joe and his first wife, Dorothy, had been dating, trying to get back together,

Bruce, on the other hand, was sometimes too clever for his own good. He was a tremendous influence on me, teaching me all about sports, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Johnny Unitas and Gordie Howe.

You never have to wait long, or look far, to be reminded of how thin the line is between being a hero or a goat” Mickey Mantle

Most programmers have a built-in bias toward being cowboys rather than farmers. That is, when a problem arises, their first inclination is to “jump on their horse and ride off” to solve the problem single-handedly. They too often skip planning, and that results in one-off solutions that could have better leveraged standards, practices, and their team. You want your software development to be more like farming. Farmers are methodical in knowing the lay of the land, studying its current chemical makeup, planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting their crops. Software that is reliable, extensible, and maintainable is developed just as methodically.

I never knew how someone who was dying could say he was the luckiest man in the world. But now I understand.

Eagleson’s Law applies: “Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do i, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it's written down, all the hesitations, all the problems. (Mickey Mantle describing writing his memoir.)

You don't know how easy this game is until you get into that broadcasting booth.”)

This is what Grace wanted us to do. Yeah, but a Babe Ruth and a Mickey Mantle… Ian and Natalie will hate it, Amy coaxed. And Aunt Beatrice will probably blow a gasket. A smile crept across his face. I guess Babe Ruth can wait.

It was as though the very process of maturation with him had been reversed, so that with experience he seemed to grow more, not less, childish.