Motivation Quote by Roger Maris

Candlestick Park was already a punchline to anyone who had to play there; Roger Maris just sharpened it into a dagger. “Built on the water” isn’t a scenic detail. It’s an indictment of a stadium dropped onto a windy edge of San Francisco Bay like an afterthought, where the weather routinely hijacked the sport. Maris’s follow-up - “It should have been built under it” - lands because it exaggerates the complaint to absurdity while still feeling, to players, basically accurate. If you’ve ever watched a routine fly ball turn into a small adventure at Candlestick, you can hear the groan inside the joke.

The intent is practical: trash-talk the conditions, defend the player’s craft, and shift blame away from performance. But the subtext is about control. Baseball sells itself as a game of skill and fairness; Candlestick’s swirling gusts made it feel like the park was the opponent, not the pitcher or the lineup. Maris’s line protects the dignity of the contest by implying the venue is illegitimate - not just inconvenient, but fundamentally misbuilt.

Context matters: this is an athlete’s critique, not an urban planner’s. It’s a working professional pointing out that the people who design and monetize the spectacle often don’t have to stand in it. The humor isn’t decorative; it’s a survival tool. By turning misery into a one-liner, Maris converts frustration into folklore, and in doing so, he permanently brands Candlestick as less cathedral than cautionary tale.