Ty Cobb Quotes

#1. The most important part of a player's body is above his shoulders.

Ty Cobb

#2. Walter Johnson's fastball looked about the size of a watermelon seed and it hissed at you as it passed.

Ty Cobb

#3. The crowd makes the ballgame.

Ty Cobb

#4. Just speed, raw speed, blinding speed, too much speed.

Ty Cobb

#5. No man has ever been a perfect ballplayer. Stan Musial, however, is the closest to being perfect in the game today.

Ty Cobb

#6. I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

Ty Cobb

#7. The great American game should be an unrelenting war of nerves.

Ty Cobb

#8. When two doctors pass each other on the street they wink at each other.

Ty Cobb

#9. I may have been fierce, but never low or underhand.

Ty Cobb

#10. Every man in the game, from the minors on up, is not only fighting against the other side, but he's trying to hold onto his own job against those on his own bench who'd love to take it away. Why deny this? Why minimize it? Why not boldly admit it?

Ty Cobb

#11. The first time I faced him I watched him take that easy windup and then something went past me that made me flinch. The thing just hissed with danger. We couldn't touch him ... Every one of us knew we'd met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ball park.

Ty Cobb

#12. When I came to Detroit I was just a mild-mannered Sunday-school boy.

Ty Cobb

#13. Speed is a great asset; but it's greater when it's combined with quickness - and there's a big difference.

Ty Cobb

#14. I'm coming down on the next pitch, Krauthead.

Ty Cobb

#15. When I played ball, I didn't play for fun ... It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a contest and everything that implies, a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

Ty Cobb

#16. The best recommendation for an umpire in the old days was: He licked somebody in the Three-I League. He ought to do.

Ty Cobb

#17. Most collisions out on the fields are needless.

Ty Cobb

#18. I never could stand losing. Second place didn't interest me. I had a fire in my belly.

Ty Cobb

#19. Baseball was one-hundred percent of my life.

Ty Cobb

#20. I had to fight all my life to survive. They were all against me ... but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.

Ty Cobb

#21. When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch.

Ty Cobb

#22. The way those clubs shift against Ted Williams, I can't understand how he can be so stupid not to accept the challenge to him and hit to left field.

Ty Cobb

#23. The base paths belonged to me, the runner. The rules gave me the right. I always went into a bag full speed, feet first. I had sharp spikes on my shoes. If the baseman stood where he had no business to be and got hurt, that was his fault.

Ty Cobb

#24. To get along with me, don't increase my tension.

Ty Cobb

#25. I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery.

Ty Cobb

#26. Don't come home a failure.

Ty Cobb

#27. The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that's it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it.

Ty Cobb

#28. I've got to be first. ALL the time.

Ty Cobb

#29. That boy Mantle is a good one.

Ty Cobb

#30. Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

Ty Cobb

#31. I've been called one of the hardest bargainers who ever held out, and I'm proud of it.

Ty Cobb

#32. A ball bat is a wondrous weapon.

Ty Cobb