Branch Rickey Quotes (7 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Branch Rickey: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous Branch Rickey Quotes

“Baseball people are generally allergic to new ideas; it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms, and it is the hardest thing in the world to get Major League Baseball to change anything—even spikes on a new pair of shoes—but they will eventually…they are bound to.”

Branch Rickey

In 1954.
Source: http://www.northsidebaseball.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=45283&start=25&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

“Luck is the residue of design.”

Branch Rickey

The Yale Book of Quotations attributes this to the "Sporting News", Feb. 21, 1946.

“…. Humankind, -- that all men anthropological come from the same source, with the same potentials, must have a potential equality in chance and opportunity and that is so right, I think, that posterity will look back upon what we are doing today in our domestic issues here. They will look back upon it, I think, with incredulity and they'll wonder what the issue was all about. I really think so. It's solved in baseball. It'll be solved educationally. It'll be solved everywhere in the course of time.”

Branch Rickey

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNEo_mOi29U

“My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn. They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city in America equaled. Call it loyalty, and so it was. It would be a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers. Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi.”

Branch Rickey

On the relocation of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles; quoted in Bob McGee, <i>The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers</i> (Rutgers University Press, 2005, ISBN 0813536006), p. 294 http://books.google.ca/books?id=BOZyd7v1cDAC&pg=PA294&dq=%22public+without+the+quasi

“Folks, this here young man deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Not only because he pitched two no-hitters, but because he got two bonuses from Branch Rickey.”

Branch Rickey

Dizzy Dean, speaking on May 12, 1956 about pitcher Carl Erskine, during a post-game radio interview following Erskine's second career no-hitter; as quoted by Erskine in Tales from the Dodgers' Dugout: A Collection of the Greatest Dodgers Stories Ever Told (2004), p. 70

“Rickey had all the money and all the players and never let the two get together.”

Branch Rickey

Ralph Kiner, speaking on April 15, 2004, Jackie Robinson Day, in the FSNY broadcast booth; as quoted in "Dog Gone? No Way; Russo Listens to Heart, Stays with FAN" by Bob Raissman, in New York Daily News (April 18, 2004), p. 85

“Branch Rickey made me a better man.”

Branch Rickey

Bobby Bragan, explaining why he had come to Rickey's funeral. Bragan, who was a catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, had initially tried to stop Rickey from integrating the team.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNEo_mOi29U