Time & Perspective Quote by Rogers Hornsby

Hornsby wraps a swaggering threat in the manners of polite society, and that little feint is the point. “I don’t like to sound egotistical” is a fake apology that clears the runway for pure dominance. He performs humility the way a great hitter performs patience: just long enough to make the next move land harder. The punchline isn’t that he’s confident; it’s that he frames confidence as compassion. Feeling “sorry for the pitcher” turns the matchup into something already decided, as if the poor guy on the mound is walking into bad weather he can’t control.

The subtext is psychological warfare. A hitter can’t control outcomes, but he can control posture, and Hornsby’s posture is inevitability. By centering the pitcher’s impending misery, he flips the usual narrative of pitcher-as-hunter, hitter-as-prey. It’s also a subtle flex about mastery: you only pity an opponent when you’ve seen enough patterns to believe their best options still won’t work.

Context matters: Hornsby wasn’t a loudmouthed entertainer; he was a technician with numbers to back it up, a famously intense, exacting star in an era when baseball mythology prized grit and understatement. That tension makes the line sing. It’s not bravado for attention; it’s a cold, almost clinical self-report from someone who treated hitting like a solved problem, and wanted you - and every pitcher - to feel that.