Top 60 Inning Quotes & Sayings

I felt good in the bullpen and even when we came out in the first inning I felt fairly good.

If the World Series runs until election day, the networks will run the first one-half inning and project the winner.

Baseball is great because anything can happen through the ninth inning.

I feel really good in the box when I get an AB in the first inning. I feel like it just starts the day the right way.

The game in St. Louis has been halted in the fourth inning because of rain. I'll bet they have the jacuzzis going there.

I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.

I like to go see a ball game. I'll have seven, eight, nine - 10 beers, and the second inning will roll around, and I gotta go.

The Cards lead the Dodgers 4-2 after one inning and that one hasn't even started.

During the 1920s New York Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert once described his perfect afternoon at Yankee Stadium. 'It's when the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning,' Ruppert said, 'and then slowly pull away.'

When you feel like you're going to have a low-scoring game, why not have one of your better hitters have a chance? All of a sudden you're in the ninth inning and you have one of your best hitters on deck that doesn't get up. I always think about that.

I walk into the clubhouse today and it's like walking into the Mayo Clinic. We have four doctors, three therapists and five trainers. Back when I broke in, we had one trainer who carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and by the 7th inning he'd already drunk it.

Trailing 5-1, the Padres added an insurance run in the eighth inning.

I'm me on the mound. I like to show my emotion, be real aggressive and give everything I've got for one half inning. I don't have to act. What you see on the mound is what I am in real life.

If you are a reliever, you get one inning per game or if you are a starter you get one game per week. There is a lot of buildup for a little bit of work compared to the guys who play every down or play every day in baseball.

Any time you can go out there and throw 12 pitches in any inning, you give your team some momentum coming in and get some confidence out on the mound.

Leading off an inning you never know, I could get a bunt base hit and start a rally.

You never know when you're going to throw a no-hitter or if you're ever going to get the chance to do it. It's one of those deals where the ninth inning comes around; it's either going to be your night or just a complete game.

When I was with the Yankees in 1978, we were playing Baltimore at Yankee Stadium, and the score was 3 - 3 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. I led off against Tippy Martinez - a little left-hander who always gave me trouble - and the count went to three-and-oh.

So much happened (in 1968) it was hard to keep up with everything. We had Denny McLain's thirty-one victories, Gates Brown's great pinch-hitting in the clutch, Tom Matchick's home run to beat Baltimore in the ninth inning, then Daryl Patterson striking out the side to beat them in the ninth. Excitement every day in the ballpark.

In the 8th inning you can't hear the roar of the 9th, all you can do to hold yourself together, and trust.

I threw so hard (after striking out Art Fletcher & Doc Crandall in the 9th inning of Game 1 of the 1912 World Series) I thought my arm would fly right off my body.

I'm focussing on what I haven't attained, not what I have. A lot has come to me early. I don't want to get consumed with that. Winners live in the present tense. People who come up short are consumed with future or past. I want to be living in the now. My goal is to play one full game in the now, but I haven't even gotten past the first inning yet. I start thinking about where my mom is or if my dogs have been fed. The average human has 2,000 thoughts a day. The really accomplished have 1,500 because you can focus longer. I need to learn how to focus longer.

No one wants to be known as a six-inning guy.

Baseball is continuity. Pitch to pitch. Inning to inning. Season to season.

The ballgame is over...in this inning.

You've got to try to close every inning out, take it one inning at a time, one batter at a time.

You get to the ninth inning and your stomach is clear up to here. But it's not because of your job. It is because you want to win so badly.

Performances will determine who actually ends up being the eighth-inning guy.

I have to do a better job of minimizing the damage in that inning and getting us back in there with the lead still.

One curve I'll always remember was when I was pitching for Pittsburgh. Terry Kennedy was a young player with St. Louis. I threw him an 0-2 curve and it snapped. Terry's reaction was to swing straight down, like he was chopping the plate with an axe. It was the last out of the inning. After I ran off the mound, I looked over at the St. Louis dugout. There were players rolling around on the floor, laughing. Poor Terry. I'll have to admit that was a hell of a curveball.

There are only three outs an inning, and they should be treasured. Give one away, and you're making everything harder for yourself.

It is good to kind of put your pride aside for the betterment of the ball club. We are all on board for that, even if you want to go another inning.

I've pitched in a lot of different roles in my career. I've been the middle-inning guy. I've been a lefty matchup guy. I've closed. I've kind of done a little bit of everything.

If I've got a good pinch-hitter, I hate to have him stay on the bench with men on the bases in an early inning. He may end the game right there.

Coming into a game in the eighth or ninth inning is like parachuting behind enemy lines. And sometimes the chute doesn't open. You have to live with that. It's an occupational hazard.

You feel like a stud out there when people swing and miss. As I've gotten older, I've preached to our young guys that strikeouts are sexy, but outs are outs, man, no matter how you get them. It's a lot cooler for me pitching in the seventh or eighth inning than it is going 5 1/3. Your manager likes it a lot more, too.

People think the leadoff spot is a big deal. I tell people you're going to lead off the first inning, and after that, you can be a No. 4 hitter or No. 3 hitter.

Hype covers every surface of mass culture, and sports fans are intimately familiar with it - the heavy-breathing buildup that leads, inevitably, to a first-round knockout or a 30-point blowout or a fourth-inning rainout.

I never understood that when I heard people retire - they said they missed being around the guys. I don't have a need to make a play in the ninth inning of a game anymore. But being on the inside and being part of a team is something that you really do value and you really do miss.

Turning seventy is like beginning the eighth inning of a baseball game. The contest is nearing completion, but there's likely to be some action, and even a few exciting plays, before the game draws to an end.

Consistency is something you can always improve on. You can be more consistent with your mental approach, the things you do physically on the mound. Instead of doing 5 good pitches an inning, try to make six. You can always do more of what you are doing well and try to be as consistent as you can be.

I remember the Chillicothe ballplayers grappling the Long Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.

The first year was weird. I knew I was just there to talk to pitchers and not step on any toes. I could feel my adrenaline start to flow in about the sixth inning. I had to tell myself, "What the hell are you getting excited about? You're not going anywere, big boy. Just go sign some autographs." I was still programmed.

I would love to say that I have an eighth-inning guy, a seventh-inning guy, a left-handed guy, a long guy.

One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.

all through my childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, allowing me to believe that without my personal renderings of all those games he missed while he was at work, he would be unable to follow our team in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever incomplete.

It's never over. You don't want to be in the position to be down four runs in the ninth inning, but it's not over until the last out.

I'd love to play in a Red Sox game. It would be so awesome to actually walk out on the field and play, just for one inning. I'd also steal everything I could get my hands on in the clubhouse, which is why they won't let me do it.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

But I'm not going to walk Barry Bonds, like some teams do, in the first inning with nobody on.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Is it in the best interest of baseball to sell beer in the ninth inning? Probably not. The rule has got to be more clearly defined. And then some process should be set up where the judge is not also the appeals judge.

READ! Books can be as delicious as hot-fudge sundaes, as funny as clowns, as exciting as a baseball game that's tied in the 9th inning, and as beautiful as the best sunset you ever saw.

Life's like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you wake up and find out it's the ninth inning.

A lot of times, I've always looked at pitching in the All-Star Game as a prelude to how you pitch in the postseason, sometimes how you might have to pitch on two days' rest out of the pen, only throw one inning and then you have to go face the best hitters. That's what you do in the All-Star Game.

We've got to decide, how much replay do we want? Because if you start doing it from the first inning to the ninth inning, you may have to time the game with a calendar.

I know in the heat of battle, it's hard not to get angry, especially in the 19th inning.

In life, there's the beginning and the end. The beginning don't matter. The end don't matter. All that matters is what you do in between – whether you're prepared to do what it takes to make change. There has to be physical and material sacrifice. When all the dust settles and we're getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet.

In Little League back in Oklahoma, I struck out 14 batters in a six-inning game, and we won the state championship.

There is nothing like Ruth ever existed in this game of baseball. I remember we were playing the White Sox in Boston in 1919, and he hit a home run off Lefty Williams over the left-field fence in the ninth inning and won the game. It was majestic. It soared.