Pbs Shows

"My best pitch is a strike. A sinking fastball which you grip like this so you only get two seams into it, and if you turn your hand a little bit like this, it comes out, the wind pushes here, forces it down and away from a right-handed hitter. Thereby, he thinks it's a good pitch; at the last minute, it sinks, he hits the top half of the ball, and he hits a groundball to Burleson, Burleson picks it up, throws it to Yastrzemski, one away. And you do that twenty-seven times in a ball game, make perfect sinkers, then you get twenty-seven outs. Unless the hitters are smart, and then what they do is they know it's a sinker, they get up and drive the ball to right-center field between Lynn and Evans, and that's called a double, and then the pitcher has to run behind third base and back him up, and hopefully, they get the guy out at third, or it's a triple. And then, you get a runner at third and less than two outs, so they bring the infield in, and you don't want them to hit a sinker now, you gotta strike them out, so then you go to a cross-seam fastball, which I don't have."

"I collected baseball cards, so I could take all my Mickey Mantle and other Yankees, Moose Skowron, and I could put them on my bike, and I could ride down the hill and make me sound like I was going faster. There goes $5,200, $5,200 burning up down the highway. Kids today, they go, "How much is your baseball card worth?" And I'm going, "A plug nickel, son. A plug nickel." I'm saying, "Son, be your own person, do not collect baseball cards. It'll be the ruination of you. Maybe you'll learn economics a little bit or learn what value is, but you're being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur takes something of no value and makes money on it." And I do not believe in that in the kids. I teach them right off the bat, "Learn the game. Do not look at Youppi, do not look at the Chicken, do not look at that, look at the groundball. Field it cleanly with both hands, be as smooth as silk. Make the nice throw at second, have the nice breaking curveball, subtract on the change-up, see the ball and hit it. Don't associate with the other things of the game. It will eventually bring you down, eat you up, and spit you out.""

"We have these unreasonable expectations of all baseball heroes. We want them to be good at life as well as good at baseball. If you think about it, it’s unfair. It’s hard enough to expect them to play baseball well. I’m convinced there is the same division in baseball that there is in life itself: of true heroes; of people of strong principle; of ordinary everyday people; of rogues; of weaklings."

"We’ve done a whole lot of things to hurt it, but it’s a type of thing that you just can’t kill it. You can’t kill Baseball because when you get ready to kill Baseball, something is going to come up, or somebody is going to come up to snatch you...I heard Ruth hit the ball. I’d never heard that sound before, and I was outside the fence but it was the sound of the bat that I had never heard before in my life. And the next time I heard that sound, I’m in Washington, D.C.,...I rushed out…and it was Josh Gibson hitting the ball. And so I heard this sound again. Now I didn’t hear it anymore. I’m in Kansas City...I heard this sound one more time that I had heard only twice in my life. Now, you know who this is? ...Bo Jackson swinging that bat. And now I heard this sound... And it was just a thrill for me. I said, here it is again. I heard it again. I only heard it three times in my life. But now, I’m living because I’m going to hear it again one day, if I live long enough."

"A man who would stay on an ironclad from choice is a candidate for the insane asylum."

"Winfield Scott, Henry Halleck, Irving McDowell. George McClellan, John Pope, George McClellan again. Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker. Lincoln could not find the General he needed. He now knew that to win the war, the Southern armies had to be crushed. He had the men, but he needed a General with the will to use them."

"I had a good time in Washington. Lager beer and a horse and buggy, and in the evening, horizontal refreshment! Or, in plainer words, riding a Dutch gal. Had a good time generally, I tell you."

"The men knew they were cut loose from their base, knew they were gonna be dependent for their supplies on a very tenuous supply line. But Grant himself gave’em confidence. They believed Grant knew what he was doing, and one great encouragement to them believing that was quite often on the march, whether at night or in the daytime, they’d be moving along the road or over a bridge, and right beside the road would be Grant on his horse. A dust covered man on a dust covered horse, saying “move on, close up”. So they felt very much that he personally was in charge of their movement and it gave them that added confidence."

"The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until after the egg is laid."

"July 4th 1864. The Glorious fourth has come again and we have had quite a celebration, with guns firing shot and shell into Petersburg to remind them of the day. This day makes four Fourth of Julys I have passed in the Army. The first at Camp Clark, the second at Harrison's Landing, the third at Gettysburg, and today at Petersburg."

"Women who come before the public are in a bad box now. ... All manner of things, they say, come over the border under the huge hoops now worn, so they are ruthlessly torn off. Not legs but arms are looked for under hoops, and, sad to say, found."

"No group was more outraged than the immigrant Irish of New York, who feared the Blacks, who competed for the lowest-paying jobs, and for whose freedom they did not wish to fight. Democratic politicians fanned their anger."

"Davis may well have been the only Southerner who understood Southern Nationality, who understood what sacrifices had to be made if the Confederacy was ever going to gel as a nation. He kept saying, "I need the kind of powers that Lincoln got. I need the kind of resources that he got in the draft laws. I need to be able to suspend the writ of habeas corpus like he did." He would have said, "We can’t live by the dogmas of the quiet past any longer." He didn’t say that, but he acted that out. He said, "I have to be given the kinds—this Confederate government needs the kind of national authority—national power that the Union had in order to win." And they didn’t get it because States’ Rights helped kill the Confederacy."

"Sherman will never go to hell. He'll flank the devil and make heaven in spite of the guards."

"General, I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac...I have heard in such a way as to believe it of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of this that I’ve given you command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."

"More than once during the Civil War, newspapers reported a strange phenomenon. From only a few miles away, a battle sometimes made no sound, despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more-distant observers could hear it clearly. These eerie silences were called acoustic shadows."

"In less than six months, from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor to Petersburg, Grant had nearly destroyed his Army."

"The news came like a flash of lightning, staggering and blinding everyone. Farewell old fella, we privates loved ya because you made us love ourselves."

"Sally Tomkins of Richmond and a staff of only six nursed 1,333 wounded men in her private hospital, and kept all but 73 of them alive; a record unmatched by any other Civil War hospital, North or South."

"In March 1863, John Mosby’s Confederate Rangers raided Fairfax Courthouse, Virginia, capturing two captains, 30 Privates, 58 horses and Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton. "For that I am sorry," Lincoln said when told of the capture, "for I can make Brigadier Generals, but I can’t make horses." General Mosby had made life miserable for Northern commanders throughout the War. No other Confederate officer was mentioned favorably as many times in Robert E. Lee’s dispatches as John Singleton Mosby."

"The Confederacy was cut in two. The Mississippi had become a Union highway. “The father of waters,” Lincoln said, “again goes unvexed to the sea.”"

"The Confederacy has been done to death by politicians."

"It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils after breaking up hardtack in it. But they were easily skimmed off and left no distinctive flavor behind."

"If this war developed some of the most brutal, bestial, and devilish qualities lurking in the human race, it has also shown us how much of the angel there is in the best of men and women."

"We have lost the Mississippi, and our nation is divided, and there’s not enough left to fight for."

"In the summer of 1863 a Union warship hunting a Confederate commerce raider off Yokohama attacked a Japanese fleet for harassing the colony of Westerners there. The United States won its first naval battle against the Empire of Japan. But the Confederates got away."

"William Faulkner, in Intruder in the Dust, says that for every Southern boy, it’s always in his reach to imagine it being 1:00 on an early July day in 1863. The guns are laid. The troops are lined up. The flags are already out of their cases and ready to be unfurled. But it hasn’t happened yet. And he can go back to the time before the war was going to be lost. And he can always have that moment for himself."

"The Fourth of July would not be celebrated in Vicksburg again for 81 years."

"Those hateful gunboats. They look like they were from the lower regions. Now this is the second night that four of them have been anchored in the river opposite our house. [I] see the men crawling about on the boats like so many black snakes."

"'I make no terms', Davis once said, 'I make no compromise.' He refused to unbend in public, or to curry favor with the press. Privately, he commuted nearly every death sentence for desertion that reached his desk, explaining that "The poorest use of a Soldier was to shoot him.""

"The streets grew quiet when news of Gettysburg reached Clarksville, Tennessee. The 14th Tennessee regiment had left town two years before with 960 men. When the Battle of Gettysburg began, only 365 remained. ‘‘‘By the end of the first day there were 60 men left. By the end of the battle, there were only 3."

"Every evening for a month during the Siege, a Georgia sharpshooter played his cornet so beautifully, that men on both sides stopped to listen."

"Stand firm you boys from Maine. For not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities for freedom and justice, for God and humanity, as are now placed upon you."

"In Texas, General John B Magruder captured a Union flotilla at Galveston. After the bombardment, Confederate Major A. M. Lee went aboard the badly hit USS Harriet Lane. There he found his son, a Federal Lieutenant, dying on the deck."

"General Longstreet, I think, had a good reason to worry about attacking the Union position at Gettysburg. After all it was his corps at Fredericksburg that mowed down the Union troops in front of the stonewall. He could realize what the rifled musket could do, held in the hands of determined troops."

"January 24, near Falmouth. Daylight showed a strange scene. Men, horses, artillery, pontoons, and wagons are stuck in the mud. Rebels put up a sign, says 'Burnside's stuck in the mud'. We can fight rebels, but not in the mud."

"More credit for valor is given to Confederate Soldiers. They were supposed to have more élan and dash. Actually, I know of no braver men in either army than the Union troops at Fredericksburg, which is a serious defeat. But to keep charging that wall at the foot of Marye's Heights after all the failures they been in, and they were all failures, is a singular instance of valor."

"What makes it strange is that I should have gained twelve pounds living on worms."

"Lee, by the summer of 1863, had come to believe that he was invincible, and so was the Army of Northern Virginia. The record would almost invite that when you see how they had pummeled one Union General after another, and defeated, or at least fought to a draw the Army of the Potomac almost on every battle up to that point. And Lee really did think that if he asked his boys to do something, they would do it, that they would do anything. He had come by Gettysburg then to believe in his invincibility and that of his men. And it was his doom."

"It was suicide. They came forward, one man said, as though they were breasting a storm of rain and sleet. Faces and bodies half turned to the storm, shoulders shrugged. The Irish Brigade got within twenty-five paces of the wall. The men of the 24th Georgia who shot them down were Irish too."

"I lose patience with the argument that because of someone's time, that his limitations are therefore excusable, or even praiseworthy. It is not true that it was impossible in that time and place to look any higher. Think of Wendell Phillips, who, commenting on Abraham Lincoln's proposal to colonize black people out of the country, was sarcastic. He said, ‘colonize the blacks? A man might as well colonize his own hands, or when the robber is in his house, he might as well colonize his revolver.’"

"They still thought that to mass their fire they had to mass their men. So they lined up and marched up toward an entrenched line and got blown away."

"The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory of the powers of evil, which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirit of friends, all over the civilized world. The American Civil War is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs."

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for Union. The world will not forget that we say this. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth."

"I wish you could hear Joshua give off a command and see him ride along the battalion on his white horse. He looked so splendidly. He told me last night that he never felt so well in his life."

"Probably his finest hour was after the repulse of Pickett's Charge. He walked out into the field, met the men retreating, and said "It is all my fault.""

"McClellan had plenty of reserves waiting outside Sharpsburg, but he never used them. Lee, outnumbered 3-to-1, braced for a new attack all the next day. It never came. On the 18th, Lee and his army slipped back across the Potomac. McClellan could claim a victory, but he could have won the War. Lee’s invasion had been halted, he had suffered terrible losses, but his army had not been destroyed."

"It had been the bloodiest day in American history. The Union lost 2,108 dead, another 10,293 wounded or missing, double the number of casualties of D-Day, 82 years later. Lee lost fewer men, 10,318 casualties. But that was a quarter of his army."

"You do have a big problem when you have units that are from states and counties and even towns. And one of those regiments can get in a tight spot in a particular battle, like in the cornfield at Sharpsburg. And the news may be that there are no more young men in that town. They're all dead."

"They were the dirtiest men I ever saw. A most ragged lean and hungry set of wolves. Yet there was a dash about them that our northern men lacked."