Motivation Quote by Casey Stengel

Only Casey Stengel could make progress sound like a pratfall and still have it land as wisdom. "The team has come along slow but fast" is classic Stengelese: a mangled, musical contradiction that smuggles in a pretty clear idea about how improvement actually looks from the dugout. Teams rarely develop in a clean, linear climb. They slog through fundamentals, miscommunications, injuries, and the daily grind that never shows up in highlight reels. Then, suddenly, the standings tilt, the at-bats get tougher, the bullpen stops leaking runs, and it feels like everything clicked overnight. Slow work, fast results.

The intent is part message, part misdirection. Stengel is praising his club without promising too much, a manager's tightrope: you want to project momentum but avoid tempting fate or feeding the headline machine. The subtext is that outsiders mistake the visible streak for the whole story. He knows the "fast" part is what fans and writers see - a win column spike, a hot month - while the "slow" part is the boring labor and the incremental buy-in that made that spike possible.

Context matters because Stengel's public persona was a performance: the folksy, lovable wiseguy who could disarm criticism and protect players with humor. By making the sentence trip over itself, he keeps control of the narrative. If you want to argue with him, you first have to untangle him. That buys him time, and it buys his team room to keep getting better.