If I'd just tried for them dinky singles I could've batted around six hundred! - Babe Ruth

In pitching, control is the main thing—one thing you've got to have. Few pitchers have it. In batting, it is timing—waiting on the ball, not hurrying the swing—just as it is in golf. Most hitters in baseball swing too quickly. They can't wait on the pitch. Old Joe Jackson could wait. So could Speaker and Cobb

Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.

They did that to me in the American League one year. I coulda hit .600 that year slicing singles to left. [Interviewer asks why he didn't do so.] That's not what the fans came out to see.