Van Slyke Quotes

#1. I don't care what you do - baseball or politics - George W. Bush is always going to be compared to his father. I just want it to be an easy answer in 50 years - Who was the better player, me, or my kids? I want it to be my kids.

Andy Van Slyke

#2. I always respected Barry Bonds, and I wanted to let him know that I did in a certain way.

Andy Van Slyke

#3. Vanity, wounded pride, rejection, self-delusion. I could recite a litany of little pinpricks that finally produce a gaping wound. That's how marriages and friendships come apart.

Helen Van Slyke

#4. It seems like Satan has thrown the DH into our game.

Andy Van Slyke

#5. If everyone were like him (Mitch Williams) I wouldn't play. I'd find a safer way to make a living.

Andy Van Slyke

#6. Emotion seemed more valid than experience, for I had so much of the former and so little of the latter.

Helen Van Slyke

#7. He (Ozzie Smith) plays like he's on a mini-trampoline or wearing helium kangaroo shorts.

Andy Van Slyke

#8. Fear is for the old. Lack of it is one of the joys of youth.

Helen Van Slyke

#9. When you get to be my age, all your friends have either died or moved to Florida.

Helen Van Slyke

#10. The biggest adjustment from the minors was learning to spend $45 in meal money.

Andy Van Slyke

#11. They wanted me to play third like Brooks so I did play like Brooks - Mel Brooks.

Andy Van Slyke

#12. [On parents:] They're not gods to be pleased or devils to be exorcised. They're just there, and we can only hope they understand when we seem less than perfect. And try to understand, ourselves, when they're not all we'd like them to be.

Helen Van Slyke

#13. People who let the weak or greedy drink their blood sometimes have a need to play God.

Helen Van Slyke

#14. Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to do is eliminate the Grand Canyon.

Andy Van Slyke

#15. My biggest problem in the big leagues is that I can't figure out how to spend forty-three dollars in meal money.

Andy Van Slyke

#16. If someone from Germany or somewhere, who had no idea what baseball was, saw Kruk play, he'd wonder what the beer truck driver was doing playing first base.

Andy Van Slyke

#17. Even angels must find their wings too heavy sometimes.

Helen Van Slyke

#18. I have an Alka-Seltzer bat. You know-plop, plop, fizz, fizz, when the pitcher sees me walking up there he says, 'Oh, what a relief it is'.

Andy Van Slyke

#19. Isn't it boring ... how people always want to tell you their own stories instead of listening to yours? I suppose that's why psychiatrists are better than friends; the paid listener doesn't interrupt with his own experiences.

Helen Van Slyke

#20. It's a lot like life. I think 99 percent of what goes on in life, we have very little control over.

Andy Van Slyke

#21. Last year we had so many people coming in and out they didn't bother to sew their names on the backs of the uniforms. They just put them there with Velcro.

Andy Van Slyke

#22. With the Cardinals everybody would be reading the business section to see what their stocks were doing. You get to this locker room (Pirates) in the morning and everybody is looking at the sports page to see if Hulk Hogan won.

Andy Van Slyke

#23. The game is full of peaks and valleys, the key is to avoid the Grand Canyon.

Andy Van Slyke

#24. I can only guess that, for guys in their 30s and 40s who watched me play, they understood that the score never mattered and my paycheck never mattered (in relation) to how I played. I played with Little League enthusiasm and professional flair. That's what fans are really looking for.

Andy Van Slyke

#25. If arrogance is the heady wine of youth, then humility must be its eternal hangover.

Helen Van Slyke

#26. I should coldly, clinically think of myself and stop worrying about other people, as though I'm a necessary woman, indispensable to their happiness and well-being. Self-preservation is the first law. I must start trying to obey the law.

Helen Van Slyke

#27. Who says there's an unemployment problem in this country? Just take the five percent unemployed and give them a baseball stat to follow.

Andy Van Slyke

#28. Good mothers are underrated, just like good defense.

Andy Van Slyke

#29. Mail from home was so important when you were traveling. It kept you in touch with the familiar, even the part you were running from.

Helen Van Slyke

#30. The rush of power to the head is not as becoming as a new hat

Helen Van Slyke

#31. It's especially fitting that they call a cruise ship 'she,' for she is pregnant with a thousand adult embryos who long to stay forever warm and sheltered in this great white womb.

Helen Van Slyke

#32. Mario Lemieux is Mr. Pittsburgh.

Andy Van Slyke

#33. Never doubt love ... Never question it when it comes onstage, but be happy for its entrance. And do not weep when it makes its exit, for it leaves behind it the sweet aroma of caring, a fragrance to linger the rest of your life.

Helen Van Slyke

#34. Living would be a terribly pedestrian business without the impatient ones. The seekers. Always searching for something new, something relevant to leave their mark on. Always on tiptoe, anticipating discovery. Such people find change as necessary as the air they breathe.

Helen Van Slyke

#35. Eighty's a landmark and people treat you differently than they do when you're seventy-nine. At seventy-nine, if you drop something it just lies there. At eighty, people pick it up for you.

Helen Van Slyke