from ryne's hall of fame speech...

it's pretty corny, but i appreciate what he's saying and i appreciate how angry he is. also he does this thing where he repeats the word "respect" at the end of his points as an overriding theme of "respecting" the game, which is terrible. but i just read and excerpt of it and sort of thought he was doing an ali g/rasta sort of "respect", which would have been only incredible. observe and respect and move the runner over.



It was all about doing things right. If you played the game the right way, played the game for the team, good things would happen. That's what I loved most about the game, how a ground out to second with a man on second and nobody out was a great thing. Respect.

When we went home every winter, they warned us not lift heavy weights because they didn't want us to lose flexibility. They wanted us to be baseball players, not only home run hitters. I played high school football at 185 pounds and played big league baseball at 182. I'd get up to maybe 188 in the offseason because every summer I'd lose eight to 10 pounds. In my day, if a guy came to spring training 20 pounds heavier than what he left, he was considered out of shape and was probably in trouble. He'd be under a microscope and the first time he couldn't beat out a base hit or missed a fly ball, he was probably shipped out. These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It's disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up. Respect.