Twins Opening day Extravaganza! Every year we make an event of this day. First year was about 8 of us, 2nd 12 or so, 3rd about 18 and this year we have 32 people coming! We usually have a big barbecue and yard party, but this year we’re going on a pub crawl! Start at 11, drink until the game. Hope to remember it! Cant wait, I love baseball season.
Oh, we’re doing quotes!
Bob Uecker, “I haven’t seen defense this bad since the days of Bob Uecker!”
[quote=“Justin_Bailey, post:19, topic:492061”]
Vin Scully: “After 19 years in the big leagues, 40 year old Billy Chapel has trudged to the mound for over 4000 innings. But tonight, he’s pitching against time, he’s pitching against the future, against age, against ending. Tonight, he will make the fateful walk to the loneliest spot in the world, the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium, to push the sun back into the sky and give us one more day of summer.”
QUOTE]
God I love that movie
It really is underrated in the pantheon of baseball movies.
My fav…
Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp… you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.
– Crash Davis
The bad part is that I’d planned to spend the afternoon watching the game, peanuts and what not, in front of the tube down here (beautiful if a bit windy in Tampa today). Now that they’ve put the game later tomorrow, he has a tournament game we’re going to have to leave the house at 4:30 to get to. We’ll record the game and watch the end, but it’s not the same.
On the plus side, the reason that they’re playing Tuesday and not today is that they mercy ruled the team they played on Saturday. The team they went against had Gooden on the mound. Yeah, that guy’s kid. They rocked his world. 
“It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.” -A. Bartlett Giamatti
“This ain’t a football game, we do this every day.” -Earl Weaver
There is no written rule, but it is part of baseball’s rich common law that batters shall not glance back to see where the catcher is setting up because that reveals the intended pitch location. A catcher may give a peeking batter a polite warning. If the batter is a recidivist, the catcher then may set up outside but call for a pitch inside. When the batter leans out toward where he thinks the pitch is going, his ribs receive a lesson about respecting the common law. Sport is a moral undertaking because it requires of participants, and it schools spectators in the appreciation of, noble things–courage, grace under pressure, sportsmanship. Sport should be the triumph of character, openly tested, not of technology, surreptitiously employed.
George Will
While I was working out, a TV was on tuned to ESPN. I may have seen the first pitch of the season, in the Reds/Mets game. Now I’ll do what I can to make it to November without seeing another one…
(Can’t do that anymore, George. Ump will issue The Warning, do it again and the pitcher’s gone.)
Pedro Cerrano: Bats, they are sick. I cannot hit curveball. Straightball I hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I ask Jobu to come, take fear from bats. I offer him cigar, rum. He will come.
Eddie Harris: You know you might think about taking Jesus Christ as your savior instead of fooling around with all this stuff.
Roger Dorn: Shit, Harris.
Pedro Cerrano: Jesus, I like him very much, but he no help with curveball.
Eddie Harris: You trying to say Jesus Christ can’t hit a curveball?
So then I take it you’re not a baseball fan? Which makes one wonder what you’re doing a thread about Opening Day.
A home opener is always exciting, no matter if it’s home or on the road.
The game is supposed to be fun. If you have a bad day, don’t worry about it. You can’t expect to get a hit every game.
Baseball is ninety percent mental; the other half is physical.
Swing at the strikes.
How can you think and hit at the same time?
It ain’t over 'til it’s over.
- Yogi Berra
From mickeyrivers.com:
“My goals are to hit .300, score 100 runs, and stay injury-prone.”
“Out of what, a thousand?”
-responding to teammate Reggie Jackson’s claim he had an IQ of 160.
“Pitching is 80% of the game and the other half is hitting and fielding”
“I might have to commute. You know, left field, DH, wherever.”
“I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan.”
-Mickey Rivers’ response to playing left field for the first time
“I like playing on this team. We actually been doin’ real good. Got a different mix here. Most important thing is you gotta keep pickin’ up in paces. That’s why we’re playing contentious play. We got top names, guys can still hit in the majors, guys been out of the game hittin’ the ball, shockin’ it. Don’t have no old, old guys. Not sayin’ they don’t get a good job done. Fact is, they’ve been vice versa. So that’s incentive right there. It’s been a plus.”
-Mickey Rivers commenting on his teammates in the SPBL in 1989
“I threw about 90% fastballs and sliders, 50% fastballs and 50 % sliders…I’m starting to sound like Mickey Rivers.”
-John Butcher, former Texas Rangers Pitcher
“That felt good. I hadn’t hit off a lefty in two months.”
-Mickey Rivers’ post game comment after hitting a double off of Boston Red Sox right handed pitcher Bob Stanley
“We’ll do all right if we can capitalize on our mistakes.”
And my favorite:
“Ain’t no sense worrying: If you have no control over something, ain’t no sense worrying about it -you have no control over it anyway. If you do have control, why worry? So either way, there ain’t no sense worrying.”
One of my favorite quotes:
My favorite Mickey Rivers’ line is this. When told that his teammate Reggie Jackson had an IQ of 150 Rivers said, “Out of what? A thousand?”
I’m going to assume this was an attempt at meta-humor. Yup, that’s it.
Y’know, most people try to at least be clever when blatantly threadshitting.
Sorry for the inexcusable (and unentertaining) threadshit.
Enjoy.
2-3 the count, nobody out, hit a high fly into the stands
Rounded third and headed for home, it was a brown-eyed handsome man
(that won the game) It was a brown-eyed handsome man
Probably my favorite baseball quote of all time.
“The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he’s going to be. You take a team with twenty-five assholes and I’ll show you the New York Yankees.”–Bill “Spaceman” Lee
“I have discovered in 20 years of moving around in a ballpark, that knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats”–Bill Veeck
“How hard is hitting? You ever walk into a pitch-black room full of furniture that you’ve never been in before and try to walk through it without bumping into anything? Well, it’s harder than that.”–Ted Kluszewski