Maybe tomorrow we'll all wear 42, so nobody can tell us apart.
You can hate a man for many reasons. Color is not one of them.
Thinking about the things that happened, I don't know any other ball player would could have done what he (Jackie Robinson) did. To be able to hit with everybody yelling at him. He had to block all that out, block out everything but this ball that is coming in at a hundred miles an hour and he's got a split second to make up his mind if it's in or out or down or coming at his head, a split second to swing. To do what he did has got to be the most tremendous thing I've ever seen in sports.
If I had my career to play over, one thing I'd do differently is swing more. Those 1,200 walks I got, nobody remembers them.
If you rush in and out of the clubhouse, you rush in and out of baseball.
Brooklyn was the most wonderful city a man could play in, and the fans there were the most loyal there were.
I used to tell Jackie (Robinson) sometimes when they were throwing at him, 'Jackie, they aren't throwing at you because you are black. They are throwing at you because they don't like you.
Being Captain of the Dodgers meant representing an organization committed to winning and trying to keep it going. We could have won every year if the breaks had gone right.
If you had a son, it would be a great thing to have him grow up to be just like Gil Hodges.
Changing from a player to a coach, I felt like a mosquito in a nudist colony. I didn't know where to begin.
I had only played five games in my senior year in high school. I was not large enough. Hell, when I graduated, I was about five foot four and weighed 120 pounds. I didn't go with the Dodgers until spring training of 1940 and I weighed all of 155 pounds soaking wet.
Why did they do it? Beats the hell out of me. I was just a scared kid from Kentucky, and these guys had been up in the majors for a while. I guess it was because I was just such a helluva nice kid - if you'll accept that.
I didn't want to play there when I first found out I was sold to Brooklyn, but I'm tickled to death. I'm glad I could play in Brooklyn.
