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Who really said it

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer

Attributed to Ted Williams 1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox hitter · Hall of Fame, 1966
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Every quote site credits Ted Williams, no one else is ever named, and the thought is unmistakably his — but no speech, book, interview or column has been produced for this wording. The earliest printings located are sports-quotation and motivational compilations, from 1984 onward, and the citation most sites inherit points only to a reference work published in 2006. Williams did make the same point in print, in a different sentence, in The Science of Hitting.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer” attributed to Ted Williams (1918–2002). No primary source has been located; the earliest printings found are sports-quotation and motivational compilations, from 1984 onward. Williams made the same point in his own words in "The Science of Hitting," where he notes that even a .300 hitter is going to fail at his job seven out of ten times. Via Quotle.info

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Ted Williams — Boston Red Sox outfielder, the last man to hit .400. Theme: "Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

Attributed to
Ted Williams (1918–2002)
Primary source
None located — no speech, book, interview or column
Earliest printings located
Sports Quotations (McFarland, 1984); Sport Inside Out (TCU Press, 1985)
Closest documented Williams wording
The Science of Hitting, with John Underwood (Simon & Schuster)

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. No primary source located

Printed here as it circulates. There is no original text behind it to quote from — the sentence exists only in quotation compilations and, from there, across the web.

The Science of Hitting on the Internet Archive

How the attribution was checked

  • Wikiquote’s Ted Williams article ↗ does not carry this line at all — not among its sourced quotations, and not among the ones it flags as misattributed. Quote Investigator has never taken the quote up either. So there is no specialist finding to defer to, in either direction.
  • The citation the web runs on is thin. Baseball Almanac ↗ is the rare aggregator that gives a book and page for each quote, and for this one it can offer only The 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, page 5 — a reference work, not a Williams utterance on a datable occasion.
  • It is not in his Hall of Fame speech: the full 1966 induction transcript ↗ contains neither ‘endeavor’ nor ‘three times out of ten’.
  • Full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books ↗ returns the phrase overwhelmingly in quotation, trivia, motivational and coaching compilations, the earliest a sports-quotation dictionary of 1984; the handful of scholarly appearances among the hits — a 1985 Texas Christian University Press readings anthology, the proceedings of the 1990 Cooperstown Symposium — themselves quote it without a source. It appears in neither of Williams’s own digitized books, though both are in that same corpus. What the corpus does hold is his real version of the idea, in The Science of Hitting ↗.

Copyright follows a source, and no source has been identified: this wording cannot be tied to any dated speech, book or interview, so no rights status can honestly be asserted — and it should certainly not be assumed public domain. Williams’s own published books, the 1969 memoir My Turn at Bat and the hitting manual The Science of Hitting, both written with John Underwood, are firmly in United States copyright, held by his estate together with Simon & Schuster.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What is actually wrong here

No rival claimant exists — nobody else has ever been credited with this sentence. What fails is the sourcing: the line is presented as documented Williams when nothing documents it.

The 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia secondary source

Baseball Almanac ↗, the site most quote pages copy from, cites this line to The 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, page 5. That is a reference book published in 2006 — a place the quote had already arrived, not a record of Williams saying it. Downstream sites such as Goodreads ↗ give no citation at all, and note that their quotes are community-added and unverified.

Ted Williams, Hall of Fame induction, 25 July 1966 not in it

His induction address is the speech people reach for when they want a Williams aphorism with an occasion attached. The full transcript ↗ contains no ‘field of endeavor’ and no ‘three times out of ten’; its famous line is about baseball giving every American boy a chance to excel.

Ted Williams, in competing versions drift

Printed versions disagree with one another. Full-text search of the Internet Archive’s books ↗ shows Glenn Liebman’s compilations printing ‘field of endeavor in which a man can succeed’, Wayne Stewart’s adding ‘and still be considered a good performer’, and Kerry Banks’s trivia book shortening it to ‘the only endeavor where’. Text copied from a page does not wobble like that.

Williams did put the same arithmetic on the record, in his own words and in a book you can open: in The Science of Hitting ↗, written with John Underwood, he observes that even a .300 hitter — a rare item, he adds — is going to “fail at your job seven out of ten times”. Same point, different sentence, real source.

Context

Why the line sticks to him

Baseball really is the arithmetic oddity the sentence describes. A hitter who makes an out seven times in ten is a .300 hitter, and a .300 hitter is a good one; in almost any other job, failing seventy per cent of the time ends the job. That is a genuinely strange fact about the sport, and it wants a spokesman.

Ted Williams is the obvious candidate, because he is the man who came closest to beating the arithmetic — .406 in 1941, .344 for a career — and because he wrote a whole book about the mechanics of hitting. When a piece of baseball wisdom needs an author, the greatest hitter who ever lived is the path of least resistance. That is exactly the mechanism by which unsourced lines find famous homes.

A quote that keeps changing its own wording is a quote nobody is copying from a page.

What the paper trail actually shows

A full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books turns up roughly sixty printings of this sentence. They are overwhelmingly quotation collections, trivia books, motivational titles and coaching guides — the genre that recycles rather than reports — and the handful of scholarly and general-trade exceptions, such as a 1985 Texas Christian University Press readings anthology and the proceedings of the 1990 Cooperstown Symposium, quote the line without a source of their own. The earliest is Andrew J. Maikovich’s Sports Quotations (McFarland, 1984), which already prints the exact wording and credits Williams — twenty-four years after his last game.

The wording will not hold still across them. Glenn Liebman’s compilations print ‘the only field of endeavor in which a man can succeed’; Wayne Stewart’s has ‘and still be considered a good performer’; Kerry Banks’s trivia book trims it to ‘the only endeavor where’. Lines copied from a printed page do not drift like that. Lines passed between quote books do.

Meanwhile the phrase appears in neither My Turn at Bat nor The Science of Hitting, both of which are in the same searchable corpus — so the silence is a real absence rather than a gap in coverage.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Failure Success Resilience

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Ted Williamsen.wikiquote.org

The community-sourced list of Williams quotations with citations. This line appears in no section of it — neither sourced nor flagged as misattributed.
Baseball Almanac — Ted Williams quoteswww.baseball-almanac.com

The one aggregator that cites a book and page for each quote. For this line it offers only The 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, page 5.
Ted Williams: Hall of Fame induction speech, 1966speakola.com

Full transcript of the speech people most often assume this line comes from. It contains neither ‘endeavor’ nor ‘three times out of ten’.
The Science of Hitting (Williams & Underwood)archive.org

Williams’s own hitting manual, digitized — the book that contains his documented version of the same idea.
Full-text book search for the phraseopenlibrary.org

Searches the Internet Archive’s scanned books. The hits are overwhelmingly quotation, trivia and motivational compilations, with a few scholarly anthologies that quote the line without a source of their own; none is a text by Williams.
Ted Williams at the Baseball Hall of Famebaseballhall.org

The Hall’s biography and career record for Williams, inducted in 1966.

The true author

Who Ted Williams was

Ted Williams

1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox outfielder, the last man to hit .400

Theodore Samuel Williams was born in San Diego in 1918 and spent his entire major-league career with the Boston Red Sox, from 1939 to 1960, hitting .344 lifetime with 521 home runs, winning two Triple Crowns and two MVP awards, and batting .406 in 1941 — still the last .400 season in the majors. He lost most of five seasons to military service as a naval aviator and Marine Corps pilot in the Second World War and Korea, and was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1966. He was also an unusually articulate technician of his own craft: with the sportswriter John Underwood he produced the memoir My Turn at Bat (1969) and the hitting manual The Science of Hitting, which is why lines about the arithmetic of batting get pinned to him so readily.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this page

No primary source located. Earliest printings located: Andrew J. Maikovich, Sports Quotations: Maxims, Quips and Pronouncements for Writers and Fans (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984), which already prints the exact wording and credits Williams; and, in a variant wording, David L. Vanderwerken and Spencer K. Wertz, Sport Inside Out: Readings in Literature and Philosophy (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1985). Standard citation offered by Baseball Almanac: Pete Palmer, ed., The 2006 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia (Sterling, 2006), 5. Compare Ted Williams with John Underwood, The Science of Hitting, rev. and updated ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/baseball-is-the-only-field-of-endeavor-where-a-man-can/

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