Bill Veeck Base Quotations

Hating the Yankees isn't part of my act. It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction.

Three strikes, you're out. I don't care if you hire Edward Bennett Williams to defend you; three strikes, you're still out. Baseball is an island of stability in an unstable world.

What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated!... Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.

Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn't changed

When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.

People identify with the swashbuckling individuals, not polite little men who field their position well. Sir Galahad had a big following - but I'll bet Lancelot had more.

If U.S. Grant had been leading a team of baseball players, they'd have second guessed him all the way to the doorknob of the Appomattox Courthouse.

Every baseball crowd, like every theatre audience, has its own distinctive attitude and atmosphere.

An island of surety in a changing world.

Baseball is a boy's game that makes grown men cry.

The season starts too early and finishes too late and there are too many games in between.

When there is no room for individualism in ballparks, then there will be no room for individualism in life.

Baseball is the only game left for people. To play basketball, you have to be 7 feet 6 inches. To play football, you have to be the same width.

This is a game to be savored, not gulped. There's time to discuss everything between pitches or between innings.

If you can't outsmart people, outwork them.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.

I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

There are only two seasons - winter and Baseball.