Mickey Mantle? Anthony J. Connor? David Plaut? Anonymous?
Question for Quote Investigator: A prominent athlete believed that even top professionals should practice and continue to improve their capabilities. This attitude was expressed as follows:
It is unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
U.S. Major League Baseball player Mickey Mantle has received credit for this remark. Would you please help me to find a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Mickey Mantle played for the New York Yankees between 1951 and 1968. In 1964 he published “The Quality of Courage: True Stories of Heroism and Bravery” which contained the following. Boldface added to excepts by QI:1
The point is, anyone who gets to the majors is a terrific ballplayer but, even so, he doesn’t know very much from a major league point of view. He has to start learning like a first-grader. When you reach the major leagues, it is unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life. You have so much to learn, so much to find out, so much to practice. And it’s the same in anything, in sport or out of it. The farther you get the more you have to learn, to study.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1982 Anthony J. Connor published “Baseball for the Love of It: Hall-of-Famers Tell It Like It Was”. The epigraph of the sixth chapter presented a version of the quotation:2
Everyone who makes the big leagues has been a baseball standout all his life. Even so, from a big league viewpoint, he has everything to learn. It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
— MICKEY MANTLE, The Quality of Courage
The passage immediately above was credited to Mantle’s book “The Quality of Courage”, but the text differed somewhat from the original passage in the book. QI does not know why the text was altered.
In 1993 David Plaut compiled and published a collection of quotations titled “Speaking of Baseball”. The 1982 version of the text was reprinted and attributed to Mantle:3
In 2006 the “Sunday Star-Ledger” of Newark, New Jersey printed the following:4
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”
Mickey Mantle, Baseball Hall of Famer,
(1931-1995)
In 2011 the “Los Angeles Times” printed a review of the movie “Moneyball” which mentioned the quotation:5
“Moneyball” starts with a quote from Yankees star Mickey Mantle: “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”
In conclusion, Mickey Mantle deserves credit for the passage he wrote in his 1964 book “The Quality of Courage”. An altered version of the passage appeared in the 1982 book “Baseball for the Love of It”. The key phrase under examination was the same in both books.
Image Notes: Picture of a baseball from Chris Briggs at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Isaiah whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1965 (1964 Copyright), The Quality of Courage: True Stories of Heroism and Bravery by Mickey Mantle, Chapter 4: Let the Critics Laugh, Quote Page 22, Bantam Pathfinder Edition: Bantam Books, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1982, Baseball for the Love of It: Hall-of-Famers Tell It Like It Was by Anthony J. Connor, Chapter 6: Learning the Ropes, (Chapter epigraph), Quote Page 65, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1993 Copyright, Speaking of Baseball, Edited by David Plaut, Chapter: Life and Baseball, Quote Page 390, Running Press Book Publishers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 2006 August 13, Sunday Star-Ledger, Thought For Today, Section One, Quote Page 29, Column 1, Newark, New Jersey. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
- 2011 September 23, Los Angeles Times, A solid triple by Kenneth Turan, Continuation title: After a deadline trade, ‘Moneyball’ is a winner, Start Page D1, Quote Page D1 and D16, Los Angeles, California. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎