Quote of the Day | March 2, 2009: They Say Nothing

Former baseball owner/showman Bill Veeck from The Hustler's Handbook, 1966:

What we have are good gray ballplayers, playing a good gray game and reading the good gray Wall Street Journal. They have been brainwashed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated! They have been homogenized, orientated and indoctrinated! Their mouths have been washed out, their appetites stunted, their personalities bleached! They say all the right things at all the right times, which means that they say nothing.

Ruth was not unique. Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils, like the Third Army busting through Germany.

Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.

Tags: Bill Veeck, The Hustler's Handbook