Motivation Quote by Bill Terry

There is an accidental poetry to Bill Terry insisting on his own “great control” while describing a feat that’s either impossible or deeply ill-advised: “I never missed hitting the other's fellow bat.” In a sport obsessed with precision, the line plays like a misfire that reveals the pressure valve underneath. Baseball talk is full of coded modesty and macho swagger; Terry reaches for the language of mastery and lands on a mangled image that’s almost vaudevillian. The comedy isn’t just in the syntax. It’s in the contradiction: control expressed as an act of collision, skill framed as aggression.

The likely intent is braggadocio - a player claiming he could place the ball exactly where he wanted, maybe even “hit the other fellow’s bat” as shorthand for outfoxing an opponent, tying him up, breaking his timing. But the phrasing slips, and that slip is the subtext: athletes are asked to narrate highly technical, split-second decisions in plain English, often on the spot, often to reporters hungry for a clean headline. What you get instead is the friction between lived expertise and public storytelling.

Context matters: Terry came from an era when players weren’t media-trained brands; they were craftsmen suddenly made quotable. The line survives because it’s a perfect fossil of that moment - the sport’s myth of exactitude, and the human reality of trying to sound in control while language, like a pitch with too much break, gets away from you.