Time & Perspective Quote by Casey Stengel

Stengel’s line lands because it starts as a familiar moral prefab and then detonates it from the inside. “There comes a time in every man’s life” is the kind of sober setup you expect before a lesson about responsibility, regret, or destiny. Then he swerves: “and I’ve had plenty of them.” The joke isn’t just that he’s old. It’s that he refuses the grandeur of the original frame. If life is supposed to deliver one defining moment, Stengel insists it’s delivered a whole messy batch - and he’s survived them all with his comic sense intact.

That’s the athlete’s version of wisdom: not a tidy principle, but an accumulation of scrapes, rallies, and improbable comebacks. Coming from Stengel, a Hall of Fame baseball man who managed dynasties and disasters, it reads like a dugout shrug aimed at anyone hunting for a single turning point. Baseball culture loves mythmaking - the big game, the clutch inning, the heroic arc. Stengel undercuts that romance by treating “time” as something that keeps showing up, like another doubleheader.

The subtext is also a little defensive, which makes it sharper. If you’ve “had plenty” of life-defining times, you’re harder to pin down, harder to lecture, harder to reduce to one failure or one triumph. It’s a one-liner that doubles as a résumé: I’ve been around, I’ve seen the supposed turning points, and I’m still here cracking jokes about the whole idea.