Major League Baseball

"Ed Roebuck was a pitcher on that team. One day he says he's going to get married, and I say I am, too. The general manager, Spencer Harris, hears about it. He had had some home-plate weddings in Fort Worth and says the fans like 'em. He asks us to do it. Roebuck's Catholic and Polish, and his family doesn't like the idea. I don't care. Roebuck gets married in the morning in a church. I get married at night at home plate. Roebuck pitches the game and then gets three days off for a honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Me? The next night I got to hit against Gene Conley."

"If Joe Torre orders a hit-and-run and it works, I pat him on the back and say, 'Smart move.' If it doesn't work, I go down and hang around the water cooler." - On being Torre's bench coach

"I remember my doctor telling me when I left the hospital that when you have brain surgery a lot of things happen to you. He said, 'You ain't never going to be the player you were.' I said, 'That's it,' and I never thought about it again."

"I've been fired by Texas, and I take a coaching job with the Yankees. Dent has been traded by the Yankees to Texas. I rent his house in Wyckoff, New Jersey. I go in there and on every——wall, there's a picture of him with that swing for that home run. Every——wall. I call him up and I tell him I turned every——one of them around, facing the wall."

"(Jim) Frey and me played on a Cincinnati team in 1947 that won the American Legion championship," he says. "We got on a train and were gone 25 days. We played in Quincy, Illinois, and then Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and then win the thing in Los Angeles. Babe Ruth was there. He was dying then, but he was active in the American Legion. I remember he shook our hands and said in that husky voice that he'd seen a lot of teams during the season, but the best one won. We come back to Cincinnati for a celebration, and then they take us to New York for the World Series. The Dodgers were playing the Yankees. Gionfriddo made that catch."

"One pitch, Mike Torrez to Bucky Dent. I sometimes think if it weren't for that one pitch I might still be in Boston."

"What you lack in talent can be made up with desire, hustle and giving a hundred ten percent all the time."

"A lot of people think he has a steel plate in his head, that he sets off metal detectors. That's not true. How do these things get started? All he has is some little buttons to fill the holes in the skull. They're made of tantalum, some kind of rare metal." - Jean Zimmer

"Are you kidding? I hired Don because of my respect for his baseball ability and my respect for him as a person. All of those computer printouts are a great crutch. Seventy-five percent of them are nonsense. What are you going to do when you go to the mound in the eighth inning and see that your pitcher is quivering when he talks to you? Look at the computer? You need a guy who knows the game at this level; who has seen it." - Jim Frey on hiring Don Zimmer

"I guess I was too young to realize how dangerous all of this was," she says. "It wasn't until we were leaving the hospital that I heard the doctor who performed the operations point to Don and say, 'See that young man? He's very fortunate to be alive.'" - Jean Zimmer on her husband Don's brain operations after a beaning

"The rest of us in school thought that maybe we could play baseball, but we also were protecting ourselves," says Frey. "We were thinking about going to college. I went. Ohio State. Don just wanted to be a ballplayer. He put the importance where he thought the importance should be, which is great. I hear these guys today say something like, 'I want to put baseball in its proper priority.' Well, if baseball's paying you $2 million a year, baseball better damned well be your first priority." - Jim Frey