Selected Passages
Selected passages
Never once did Rich Donnelly say, “This puts it all in perspective,” the cliché that rolls off everyone’s tongue whenever tragedy strikes in sports. “I’m forty-six years old,” he said. “If I haven’t got it in perspective by now, it isn’t likely that I ever will.”
Berryhill would defend him later, saying, “It wasn’t a bad pitch.” Leibrandt’s response to that was succinct: “It wasn’t good enough.”
In New York, everything is larger than life. If you’re a good guy, you’re a great guy. If you’re a little bit of a pain in the ass, you’re a cancer.
When someone noted that they had played pretty well in the game, Anderson shrugged and said, “You gotta play good once in a while.”
“Twelve games doesn’t prove a thing,” Oates said. He paused and smiled. “But it can provide some clues.”
LaRussa was promoted to Triple-A Iowa the next year. In August, Don Kessinger resigned as manager of the White Sox and Hemond asked LaRussa to take the team. “It was too soon, I wasn’t ready,” he said. “I had managed just a little more than a year in the minors. But I remembered picking up a Reader’s Digest a few years earlier and reading a story in there about a guy, a writer, who had been offered an assignment totally out of his area of expertise. He turned it down, because he didn’t think he could handle it. He never got another chance. The point of the story was that you had to take your shot, no matter what, because you might never get another one. And the more you’re exposed to pressure, the better you deal with it. I still have the story someplace.”
Sometimes the obvious needs stating.
“One thing you have to remember is that baseball is part of society,” McRae said. “You aren’t going to change society overnight, or, for that matter, baseball. I know there are always going to be people who judge me as a black manager rather than as a manager, and there are going to be people who want me to fail just because I’m black. Does that upset me? Sometimes. But you can’t let it. If you do, you’re giving them what they want.”
If he’s not on, you still have a long night on your hands; Clemens will battle on every pitch. “The games that give me the most satisfaction are the ones where I don’t have my good fastball or my control isn’t quite there and I still find a way to win the game,” he said. “You’re more likely to see me smiling, walking off the mound, after I give up nine hits and win 4–3 than after a shutout. I think what makes you a great pitcher is finding a way to win on the nights when it isn’t easy. There’s nothing to it when you have God-given talent and it’s all there that night."
In the end, it came back to attitude. Showalter convinced his players they could win. Runnells, for whatever reason, had them thinking too much about losing.
“All I’ve tried to do as manager of this team is get the fear of losing the hell out of this clubhouse. We’re gonna go out and play tonight and if we lose, we’ll come in here and believe that we’ll win tomorrow. That’s all I can ask.”
“I think one thing I have going for me with Barry is that he’s not quite sure whether or not I like him,” Leyland said, smiling. “He’s not used to that. He’s used to people wanting to be his friend or wanting him to do things for them. I don’t want him to do anything except come to play every day and he’s going to do that no matter what. He knows I’ll never ask him for anything beyond that. So we get along just fine.”
“A word of encouragement at a time of failure is worth a novel of praise at a time of success.”
No battle that is fought just for the sake of winning is worth fighting.