Motivation Quote by Pee Wee Reese

Captaincy, in Reese's telling, isn't a patch on the sleeve so much as a job description: embody the Dodgers' house religion of winning, then sell it back to the clubhouse every day. The first sentence is pure institutional loyalty, the kind athletes learn to speak fluently because it shields the messy truth that "commitment" is often just pressure with better PR. Still, coming from a player who actually captained a famously loaded, famously restless Brooklyn team, it lands as more than boilerplate. He's naming the emotional labor of leadership: you perform steadiness so everyone else can stay sharp.

Then he pulls the pin: "We could have won every year if the breaks had gone right". That's not arrogance so much as the athlete's favorite theology, where results are a tug-of-war between preparation and the whims of fate. The subtext is self-protection and self-assertion at once. It insists the Dodgers were good enough to be inevitable, while giving cover for the seasons they didn't cash in. "Breaks" becomes a polite euphemism for injuries, bad hops, a hot opposing pitcher, or a single pitch that tilts history.

Context matters: Reese lived through the Dodgers' long stretch of near-misses before the 1955 breakthrough, and through the era when October baseball could turn on one short series. His line preserves that particular mid-century ache: a powerhouse judged not by how often it contended, but by the thin margin between dynasty and footnote.