Dizzy Dean
American baseball player and coach
Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean (January 16, 1910 – July 17, 1974), also known as Jerome Herman Dean (both the 1910 and 1920 Censuses show his name as "Jay"), was an American professional baseball pitcher.
It don't make no difference
how you say it, just so you say it
in a way that makes sense.
Did you ever meet anyone in your life
that didn't know what ain't means?
Quotes
edit
Josh, I wish you and Satchel
played with me on the Cardinals.
Hell, the pennant would be won by July 4th, and we could go fishing until World Series time.
- Josh, I wish you and Satchel played with me on the Cardinals. Hell, the pennant would be won by July 4th and we could go fishing until World Series time.
- Circa October 1934 (following a post-season exhibition game between the Pittsburgh Crawfords and an MLB all-star team composed primarily of members of the 1934 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals), as quoted in "Brown Bambino of Baseball: For Lack of an Offer" by Haskell Cohen, in The Baltimore Afro-American (July 18, 1942), p. 23
- I ain't done nothin' about my language yet, but I want to say one thing. It don't make no difference how you say it, just so you say it in a way that makes sense. Did you ever meet anyone in your life that didn't know what ain't means?
- Quoted, circa fall 1942, by the Christian Science Monitor; reproduced in "Ain't It the Truth," Des Moines Tribune (October 10, 1942), and in America's Dizzy Dean (1978) by Curt Smith, pp. 121–122
- Well, this 'headwork' on my part comes in good because the ball hits me smack dab in the middle of the forehead and knocks me colder than a mackerel, but I busts up the double play. I don't come to for a half-hour, and they rush me to the hospital to take a lot of X-rays and see how bad off I am. [...] The next day the papers come out with big headlines, "Dizzy Dean's Head Shows Nothing." I think they could have worded it different.
- Recalling his ill-fated pinch-running appearance in Game 4 of the 1934 World Series, in The Dizzy Dean Dictionary and What's What in Baseball (1943); reproduced in "Sports of the Times: Dizzy Dean, Author Extraordinary" by Arthur Daley, The New York Times (September 13, 1943), p. 24
- You learn 'em English, and I'll learn 'em baseball.
- As quoted in America's Dizzy Dean (1978) by Curt Smith, p. 120
Quotes about Dean
edit- Diz never announced. He just sort of talked the game. That's the way he was on television, on radio before. You felt you were around a potbellied stove and he was speaking to you. He was funny, warm. He didn't let you listen or watch; he made you.
- Bill MacPhail, as quoted in America's Dizzy Dean (1978) by Curt Smith, p. 118
- 'Dizzy' ain't dizzy and 'Daffy' ain't daffy. They're plenty smart and fine boys.
- Will Rogers, reporting on his visit to each team's locker room, following Dean's Game 7 victory over Detroit in the 1934 World Series, in "Will Rogers Says," Imperial Valley Press (October 10, 1934), p. 20
- I predicted at the last World Series (and that was early in the Series, not after he had carried it away in his pocket), I said he would replace the Babe. He is sho chuck full of personality and he is boastful, but it's not in a fresh way. It's in a kidding way, and he is always laughing, and he is what they call a natural ball player. He can do anything. Frankie Frisch put him in there to run bases, because he can run bases, and he will get a hit off anybody's pitching, and he loves to play ball. Will pitch every day if they let him.
- Will Rogers, "Don't Call Dizzy Dean's Brother 'Daffy'," Boston Globe (February 17, 1935), p. B5; reproduced in Will Rogers' Weekly Articles: The Roosevelt Years (1982), p. 198
