Motivation Quote by Casey Stengel

Stengel’s line is the kind of baseball logic that sounds like a fortune cookie until you hear it in the dugout, after the third straight loss, when reporters want a clean explanation and the game refuses to give one. “Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa” is deliberately self-canceling: he sets up a rule, then snaps it in half. That’s the point. Baseball is a sport addicted to certainty (batting averages, earned runs, “clutch”), and Stengel—master of oblique, comic deflection—reminds you that every tidy narrative has an equal and opposite narrative waiting to embarrass it.

The intent is partly protective. As a manager, Stengel dealt in confidence and cover: keep players from drowning in blame, keep the press from pinning outcomes on a single cause. If good pitching “always” stops good hitting, then the hitters aren’t failures; they ran into excellence. If good hitting beats good pitching, then the pitcher didn’t “choke”; he got beat by someone doing their job at the highest level. Either way, the moral accounting stays ambiguous.

The subtext is a worldview: competition isn’t a math problem, it’s a collision of strengths. Stengel’s era—pre-sabermetrics, heavy on gut, mythology, and clubhouse psychology—needed these elastic truths. He’s not offering analysis so much as inoculation against overanalysis. The quote works because it sounds authoritative while refusing to be pinned down, a manager’s rhetorical knuckleball that keeps everyone swinging at air.