Daily Inspiration Quote by Vin Scully

“It’s easier to pick off a fast runner than to pick off a lazy runner” is peak Vin Scully: a clean, almost folksy line that smuggles a bigger truth inside a baseball detail. On the surface, it’s about baserunning mechanics. Speed tempts players to take leads, to wander a step too far, to assume athleticism will bail them out. The “lazy runner,” meanwhile, isn’t daring enough to become a target. He stays close, risks less, gives the pitcher and catcher nothing to punish.

The subtext is a sly reversal of what fans are trained to believe. We worship speed as pure advantage, but Scully points out how talent can become its own trap. The fast runner gets picked off because he’s engaged, visible, restless - he’s trying. The lazy runner survives by being forgettable. It’s a line about attention: the moment you signal ambition, the world starts timing you, studying you, waiting for the tiny lapse.

Scully’s intent isn’t to celebrate laziness; it’s to praise discipline. Great baserunning is restraint as much as it is acceleration, a craft of reading pitchers, controlling impulses, managing the ego that says, “I’m fast enough.” In the broader Scully context - decades of narrating American meritocracy in spikes and dirt - it’s a reminder that raw tools don’t outrun fundamentals. Sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do with a gift is assume it makes you untouchable.