Motivation Quote by Branch Rickey

Branch Rickey’s line has the clean, locker-room snap of someone who lived around pressure, superstition, and the strange psychology of slumps. “Seeing the devil” is concrete: a bad break, a hostile crowd, the pitcher who has your number, the scandal in the papers. You can face a thing you can name. “Thinking about the devil” is the spiral: rehearsal of disaster, the self-made movie of failure that plays on loop long before anything actually happens.

Rickey isn’t offering theology; he’s diagnosing anxiety as a competitive disadvantage. The subtext is pragmatic and almost managerial: fear is most powerful when it’s abstract, when it expands to fill the empty space before the first pitch. Once the devil shows up, it has boundaries. You can adjust, call the next play, make a trade, change the signs. Anticipation is harder to coach because it disguises itself as preparation while quietly draining nerve and attention.

Context matters because Rickey wasn’t just “an athlete” in the modern celebrity sense; he was baseball’s great architect, a preacher’s son turned executive who sold discipline as salvation and self-control as strategy. This quote fits a mid-century sports culture that treated mental toughness like a moral virtue and worry like a vice. It’s also a sly piece of persuasion: don’t borrow trouble, because the borrowed version is always inflated. The real devil, at least in Rickey’s worldview, is manageable. The imagined one is undefeated.