All figures
Reference corpus author1886–19618 lines
Ty Cobb
The Georgia Peach — baseball's fiercest competitor and the sport's highest career batting average for nearly a century. Abrasive, relentless, and blunt about what it costs to win.
Independently indexed citations from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1905) and Wikiquote — cited and licensed, not part of the curated verbatim registry.
“I feel that anything I could say in the way of eulogizing Hans would not be one-hundredth as much as he deserves, so I will just say my heart is with him tonight in wishing him three or four more…”
On , from a letter written in February 1915, expressing regret at being unable to attend a banquet honoring Wagner; as quoted in "Wagner Greatest of All Diamond Stars, Says Cobb," The Pittsburgh Gazette Times (February 23, 1915), p. 10reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“Why not? Certainly it is okay for them to play. I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no…”
Responding to the impending integration of the , as quoted in "Between the Lines" by Dean Gordon Hancock (ANP), in The Atlanta Daily World (February 10, 1952); reproduced in "The Knife in Ty Cobb’s Back" (30 August 2011), Smithsonian, by Gireference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“Williams is one batter I thought would break my lifetime batting average of .367. If he'd learned to hit to left, Ted would have broken every record in the book.”
On Ted Williams, as quoted in "Here's the Pitch" by Frank Finch, in The Los Angeles Times (June 5, 1958), p. C2reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“I think if I had my life to live over again, I'd do things a little different. I was aggressive, perhaps too aggressive. Maybe I went too far. I always had to be right in any argument I was in,…”
Statement made in 1961, as quoted in Voices from Cooperstown: Baseball's Hall of Famers Tell It Like It Was (1998) by Anthony J. Connor, p. 286reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“I've been called one of the hardest bargainers who ever held out, and I'm proud of it.”
Ch. 5 : "Bugs" — That First Bitter Series — $5000 or Bust, p. 76reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“A ball bat is a wondrous weapon.”
Ch. 5 : "Bugs" — That First Bitter Series — $5000 or Bust, p. 81reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“On the diamond, I had been rough on Babe. I'd never taken my spurs out of his hide and one day he'd come looking for me in the Detroit clubhouse with fistic mayhem in mind. We'd won and lost duels…”
On Babe Ruth, in Ch. 16 : The Babe and I, p. 214reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
“I can't honestly say that I appreciate the way in which he changed baseball — from a game of science to an extension of his powerful slugging — but he was the most natural and unaffected man I ever knew.…”
On Babe Ruth, in Ch. 16 : The Babe and I, p. 222reference only0.60
Wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0Full provenance →
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