Motivation Quote by Roger Maris

Maris’s line is a quiet swing at the mythology that baseball loves to sell: the lone slugger, blessed by fate, sending a ball into orbit on pure instinct. He’s not denying talent or luck; he’s demoting them. “Not by chance” is the key phrase, a corrective aimed at a culture that treats big moments like lightning strikes and stars like weather systems. Maris insists the spectacular is manufactured, not bestowed.

The intent is partly motivational, but it’s also defensive in a way that makes sense coming from the man who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961 under a microscope. Maris was hounded, a reluctant hero in a sport that preferred its legends pre-approved and its records embalmed. In that context, preparation becomes a moral alibi: I didn’t steal this from Ruth or from history; I earned it through repetition, discipline, and an almost unglamorous professionalism.

The subtext is about control. Baseball is famously a game of failure, where even the best hitters make outs most of the time. “Preparation” is the one lever a player can reliably pull in a landscape of bad hops, nasty break on a slider, and the randomness of a 162-game season. Maris frames the home run not as a miracle but as a system: study the pitcher, refine the swing path, build the body, manage the mind. It’s an anti-romantic credo that hits harder because it comes from someone whose most famous achievement was constantly treated as an accident of circumstances rather than the product of work.