Arnold Hano Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

Now it was Liddle, jerking into motion as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping in to Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I have ever seen ball hit, on a high line to dead center field. For whatever it is worth, I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.

Arnold Hano
In that one moment, during an era in which sluggers threatened to take over the sport, Carl Hubbell had restored to pitching its true eminence. The man with skill in his arm, courage in his heart, and craft in his brain, could still set down the brute man with the club. It meant more than a man striking out great hitters; it stood for baseball's interpretation of man's growth. We have come away from men with clubs and dim brains. Hubbell's performance those five outs was baseball's way of representing all this, of representing the contest between brains and brawn. Never was brawn so thoroughly routed.

Arnold Hano
Is there a solution? Probably not. Yet there is a glimmer of hope, and on my last days here, I offer it to you, gratis. Incorporate every township and village in the county. Take them out of the county's jurisdiction. Give the county supervisors nothing to do. They do it so well; why deprive them?

Arnold Hano
He always threw to the right base. We say that about most outfielders. Ruth always threw to the right base. DiMaggio always threw to the right base. The others maybe did, maybe didn't. Mays most of the time threw to the right base, but Ruth always threw to the right base.

Arnold Hano
He wanted to win so badly it killed him. But before it killed him, it elevated the game of baseball, at the Polo Grounds, to a grim spectacle of play-war. The analogy fits McGraw. He reminds you more of a battlefield general than he does a sportsman, and if he reminds you of a general, it would be a man who combined the fury of a Patton and the spectacular, yet knowledgeable, flair of MacArthur. Perhaps this desire to win occasionally overflowed its normal limits and became an obsession; perhaps the grimness darkened the sport at times. This was his weakness, for McGraw was not infallible; McGraw was not perfect. Perfection is lifeless, mechanical, uncaring. McGraw was never uncaring. If he was anything, he was a man who cared.

Arnold Hano
When he died, he held fourteen baseball records, a little man with a bashful smile, a silken swing, baseball's legendary nice guy. His death was the worst that could have happened to baseball, but his playing career had been the best.

Arnold Hano
He's not really a difficult interview. You just have to catch the essence and rhythm of what he's saying. I'd ask him how baseball has changed over the past 25 years and he'd start telling me about his life as a dental student in Kansas City.

Arnold Hano
The impregnability of his stonewall defense rested on his ability to reach the ball, and then throw it. Now he could move less well; now he was not coming up with the ball with that "perfect technique" Eddie Brannick had once admired, his body beautifully balanced, the ball directly in front of him. Now it was a movement full of desperate lunges. Fortunately he had his great arm, so even off-balance, he was throwing out runners, and each time he'd throw—though it had happened hundreds of prior times—the fans at the Polo Grounds, or elsewhere around the league, would gasp at the low blur that streaked across the diamond, dead on target. But he had more than a powerful arm. He had courage. And on he played, in pain and out.

Arnold Hano
Sometimes in his last years they'd take him out after maybe seven innings and put in Sammy Byrd or some other right fielder for defensive purposes because he was getting pretty out of shape. And we kids, we knew better, we knew the rule, but we'd yell We want the Babe! We want the Babe! from the seventh inning until the ninth inning. Once in a while he'd come out of the dugout and he'd lift up his cap or do something like that. We knew he couldn't come back into the lineup, but that didn't stop us. That's the way we were. We loved him, and he loved us, which was very nice. A great combination. I'd see him in his great polo coat on Broadway sometimes, with his jaunty cap, and his wife and daughter walking along. He was just wonderful.

Arnold Hano
She snorted. My wife has three ways of showing disapproval. She harangues loud and long when she is not very sure of her position. Or she may be entirely silent when she is terribly sure. This is usually an act of kindness on her part, as though she were dealing with a dumb animal. Or, lastly, she may snort. This means, I have at last learned, that she disagrees, that she thinks I am a dumb animal, and by God, kindness can go just so far.
On his wife's reaction to the notion (of showing up at the ball park without a ticket, for Game 1 of the World Series, and expecting to get in) that gave rise to this, his best known book,

Arnold Hano
Jim Thompson. Dead 14 years next month. The Academy Awards are upon us, and as I write this, I do not know what's been nominated for what. But I have a hunch this is the year of Thompson. I believe somebody famous will stand there to thank God and Swifty Lazar, if you can tell the difference, and then with a stifled sob, add a special thanks to Jim Thompson. And people will stand and cheer his name. I only hope Alberta is right, and that Jimmy hears the applause. But I doubt it. Jim Thompson stories seldom have happy endings.

Arnold Hano
Jim was a big sheepdog of a man, 6-feet-4, 250 pounds, softhearted, soft-spoken. I never heard him use a dirty word; I never heard him tell a salacious story. Yet his novels are full of such words and stories; he seemed to have a need to dig deeply into the dark depraved nature of man. Nobody did it better. But then, anything he did, he did better. Two years ago, crippled by strokes, he appeared in a film, "Farewell, My Lovely," playing the cuckolded judge. When his wife in the film, played by Charlotte Rampling, carries on with Robert Mitchum in front of him, there is a look on his face that is part bewilderment, part despair and all forgiveness. He was that way, turning up the dark corners of the soul with love and forgiveness.

Arnold Hano
Jim Dilley, the father of the Laguna Greenbelt, used to take roses to the secretaries of the county Board of Supervisors when he'd go to do battle over open space with the secretaries' bosses. Jim Dilley was a nice man, kind and gentle. He smoked a pipe. His eyes twinkled as though he knew a joke the rest of us didn't. But he's dead, and the Board is still alive, and that is a joke on us of monstrous proportions. I'm not nice, kind or gentle. The Board keeps rubber-stamping building permits, and this is my goodbye to these shores. After 36 years, my wife and I will soon leave Orange County for Costa Rica, to join the Peace Corps, and that, too, is a joke. We traipse off to bring peace to Costa Rica, which hasn't had an army since 1948.

Arnold Hano
When you think of natural ballplayers, only two come into mind, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays.

Arnold Hano
I enjoyed that interview. He's a guy who not only says what he means but backs it up, too. I'll never forget the night I interviewed him. It was a rainy night at his house in L. A. and I kept looking outside on the lawn. He had this big black Doberman he called Rommel, and it sat out there in the rain eating a chaise lounge.

Arnold Hano
All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man's arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.

Arnold Hano