Bill Veeck Quotations

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.

The true harbinger of spring is not crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano, but the sound of the bat on the ball.

There are only two seasons - winter and Baseball.

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

The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.

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

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.

I was in the game for love. After all, where else can an old-timer with one leg, who can't hear or see, live like a king while doing the only thing I wanted to do?

After a month or so in St. Louis, we were looking around desperately for a way to draw a few people into the ball park, it being perfectly clear by that time that the ball club wasn't going to do it unaided.

I do not think that winning is the most important thing. I think winning is the only thing.

Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes, too?

I try not to kid myself. You know, I don't mind romancing someone else, but to fool yourself is pretty devastating and dangerous.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.

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.

Suffering is overated.

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.

I believe in God, but I'm not too clear on the other details.

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.

An island of surety in a changing world.

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

Though it is a team game by definition, it is actually a series of loosely connected individual efforts.

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

Suffering is overrated. It doesn't teach you anything.

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

Next to the confrontation between two highly honed batteries of lawyers, jungle warfare is a stately minuet.

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.

To give one can of beer to a thousand people is not nearly as much fun as to give 1,000 cans of beer to one guy. You give a thousand people a can of beer and each of them will drink it, smack his lips and go back to watching the game. You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it.

I don't want the natural athlete -- I want a guy who'll go after the hard ones.

I don't mind the high price of stardom. I just don't like the high price of mediocrity.

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

Tradition is the albatross around the neck of progress.

How can you be a sage if you're pretty? You can't get your wizard papers without wrinkles.

If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan frees a man from any other form of penance.

I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

McGraw had been a great friend of my father's in the days when McGraw was managing the New York Giants and my daddy was president of the Chicago Cubs.

I did my best to look ashamed of myself.

When you're out there in the big league pressure cooker, a pitcher's attitude -- his utter confidence that he has an advantage of will and luck and guts over the hitter -- is almost as important as his stuff.

We lived and died on every pitch, ... This was the most exciting year, and, let me tell you, I have seen a lot of teams.

The White Sox had long ago tested the loyalty of their rooters; the weak and faint of heart had fallen by the wayside and only the strong, the dedicated and the masochistic remained. If there is any justice in this world, to be a White Sox fan freed a man from any other form of penance.

Im for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what cant be done.