Quotes from Jim Bouton

Don't ever think $7,000 isn't a lot of money in baseball. I've had huge arguments over a lot less.

High school games would just as big a deal to me as any major league game.

Doubleday's First Law, which states that if you throw a fastball with insufficient speed, someone will smack it out of the park with a stick.

When I approached him a second time with the cameras rolling, Munson grabbed the microphone and suggested I perform a physical impossibility.

They have bedsheet banners in Atlanta too. They say REBEL. Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn't they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old.

Before the first workout, Joe Schultz, the manager (he's out of the old school, I think, because he looks like he's out of the old school—short, portly, bald, ruddy-faced, twinkly eyed), stopped by while I was having a catch. "How you feeling, Jim?" he asked. I wonder what he meant by that.

You spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out it was the other way around all the time.

If you had a pill that would guarantee a pitcher 20 wins, but might take five years off his life, he'd take it.

How come nobody wants to argue with me? Is it because I'm always so right?

Forget goals. Value the process.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

Back then, if you had a sore arm, the only people concerned were you and your wife. Now it's you, your wife, your agent, your investment counselor, your stockbroker, and your publisher.