Motivation Quote by Don Drysdale

Rage, but make it professional. Don Drysdale’s line lands because it takes a tiny, technical failure - a “curve that hangs,” the pitcher’s nightmare of a breaking ball that doesn’t break - and translates it into pure, bodily disgust. Not “I’m disappointed,” not even “I’m furious,” but “I want to chew up my glove”: an image of self-cannibalizing frustration. The violence is pointed inward. He’s not threatening the batter or the ump; he’s attacking the nearest symbol of his own craft, the glove as both tool and accomplice.

The intent is crystalline: Drysdale is describing the moment control slips, and with it, authority. A hanging curve isn’t just a mistake; it’s an invitation. The hitter doesn’t have to outsmart you. The pitch arrives like an apology. Drysdale’s subtext is that pitching is a moral economy: you’re supposed to earn outcomes through precision, and when you don’t, you feel exposed. Chewing the glove becomes an attempt to erase the evidence, to punish the part of the self that betrayed the standard.

Context matters because Drysdale wasn’t a cuddly aphorist; he was a hard-era ace, the kind of pitcher whose brand was intimidation and command. For someone built on control, a hung curve is humiliating not only because it gets hit, but because it reveals contingency in a role that sells certainty. The quote works because it captures the private emotional cost of public performance: the split-second where the athlete knows, before anyone else does, that he has handed the other side a gift.