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Motivation Quote by Reggie Jackson

"When you take a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it there with beautiful clarity"

About this Quote

Reggie Jackson is describing hitting as a kind of instant authorship: not just reacting, but composing. The phrasing matters. “Take a pitch” isn’t “swing at a pitch.” It suggests patience and selection, the hitter choosing his moment instead of being chosen by it. Then “line it somewhere” turns a violent, split-second act into placement, like setting down a sentence exactly where it belongs.

The analogy to thinking “something and put[ting] it there” is doing cultural work. Baseball talk often fetishizes mechanics, but Jackson smuggles artistry into the clubhouse without sounding precious. He doesn’t claim genius; he claims clarity. That’s the subtext: the best swings feel inevitable, clean, almost non-athletic, as if the body briefly stops being a body and becomes intention made visible. “Beautiful clarity” is a phrase you’d expect in a writing workshop, not a batter’s box, and that’s why it lands. It reframes power as precision, impulse as decision.

The context is Jackson’s era and persona: a superstar famous for October theatrics, for being both admired and resented, for making pressure look like a stage. This line reads like a rebuttal to the idea that clutch hitting is just luck or swagger. He’s insisting there’s cognition inside the spectacle. In a sport obsessed with failure rates, he’s naming the rare moment when mind and contact sync, and the result feels less like survival and more like expression.

Quote Details

TopicSports
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Jackson, Reggie. (2026, January 15). When you take a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it there with beautiful clarity. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-you-take-a-pitch-and-line-it-somewhere-its-151210/

Chicago Style
Jackson, Reggie. "When you take a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it there with beautiful clarity." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-you-take-a-pitch-and-line-it-somewhere-its-151210/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"When you take a pitch and line it somewhere, it's like you've thought of something and put it there with beautiful clarity." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/when-you-take-a-pitch-and-line-it-somewhere-its-151210/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.

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Reggie Jackson on clarity in hitting
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About the Author

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Reggie Jackson (born May 18, 1946) is a Athlete from USA.

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