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I always thought I'd be a great coach. I don't know what a manager does.

Well, that all depends. Consider Casey Stengel, amidst delivering his first talk to his freshly constituted New York Mets during their first spring training: Do you see them white lines, the ones which go from home plate to the outfield wall? Them white lines are for the hitters to aim at, because all them fellers in the middle are called fielders.

Classic Stengel exchange, with Mickey Mantle. Mantle played in Ebbets Field for the first time in the 1952 World Series. Stengel was showing him the peculiar angles of the park's outfield wall, especially near where the famed right field wall, with the famous lower-half angle and the scoreboard dividing it in half, met the center field wall. "Now," he said to Mantle, "when I played here---" Mantle burst out laughing, really breaking up. Said he: "You played here?" Said Stengel, laughing himself, when one of the New York sportswriters who'd ambled by heard the exchange, "This kid thinks I was born 60 years old and started managin' right away. They never think we did anything before we done it."

Classic managerial commentary:

Hold on. I'll think of something. - Charley Dressen, Brooklyn Dodgers (1951-53)

We try every way we can think of to kill this game. But for some reason, nothing nobody does never hurts it. - Sparky Anderson, Detroit Tigers.

I tell them I'm tall, handsome, and debonair. Of course, that's what I tell them when I talk to the school for the blind. - Rocky Bridges, legendary minor league manager.

James, if you keep pitching like you are today, you're going to be pitching again for me next year. - Minor league manager Jimmy Gleeson, to future Yankee star Jim Bouton, after a particularly rough day.

Goddamn it, maybe there are too many of 'em now. Just give me a team of nine of 'em and let me manage 'em. - Casey Stengel, on blacks in the major leagues.

This ain't football. We do this every day. - Earl Weaver, Baltimore Orioles.

Just a haircut and a shave and don't cut my throat. I may want to do that myself later. - Casey Stengel, to his barber, while he was managing the Boston Braves of 1938-43.

Rowrowrowrrowwrowroworrroowwwrr! - On-again, off-again Yankee manager Billy Martin during a typical tirade.