Some good quotes

Two courtesy of Joe Posnanski:

Mike Boddicker... tells a great story about facing Kirby Puckett. Bod threw one of his junk pitches (he had a million of them) and struck out Puckett ... and Puckett -- WHILE HE WAS SWINGING AND MISSING -- yelled, "If you're going to throw the ball, throw it like a man."

and

[Jim Palmer] tells a great story about facing Al Kaline in his first start. He said the first time he faced Kaline, he thought, "I'll bust him inside with a fastball." Kaline crushed it to left for a home run. Palmer said, "OK, he can hit my fastball. But what about my curve?" Next time up, he threw his best curve outside, and Kaline smacked it to right field for a single.

"I learned an important lesson that day," Palmer said. "I learned Al Kaline was better than me."

And one from New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro:

The ugliest incident I ever took part in happened in the Mets clubhouse in Miller Park in Milwaukee a few years ago. This was when the Mets had Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn, that group. I’d been in Milwaukee covering a Nets-Bucks playoff series and my boss suggested I stay the weekend because the Mets were falling apart already and it was only May. So I did. And in the Saturday paper I wrote a column that basically said the Mets weren’t just a lousy team, they were one of the most impossible-to-like teams New York had seen since … well, since the last time the Mets had gotten a bunch of stooges in the Bobby Bo/Vince Coleman era. In the column I’d been especially critical of the GM, Steve Phillips, whom I never thought very highly of and had occasionally been somewhat vicious in saying so.

Well, Phillips blew his stack, and he had the PR guy, Jay Horwitz, bring me into an office off the clubhouse, made sure he kept the door open and started to curse me at the top of his lungs, a show that was clearly designed to make him look like a tough-guy in front of his players and an act that, to me, is the height of insecure foolishness. I let him rant and rant and rant. Finally he said, “My wife read that piece of junk! You made her cry!” After which I’d had enough and said, “That makes two of us, doesn’t it Steve,” a not-terribly-subtle reference to his past life as an admitted adulterer. I thought he was going to take a swing at me. He didn’t. About two weeks later he was fired.