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Who really said it

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run

Attributed to Babe Ruth 1895–1948 · American baseball player, New York Yankees
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Credited to Ruth almost everywhere, and squarely in line with the swing-hard-or-go-home philosophy he really did put on record — but no letter, interview, column or book from his lifetime has been found carrying this sentence. The citation quote references actually give is a business book published in 2001, decades after Ruth died in 1948.

Last verified 22 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run” attributed to Babe Ruth (1895–1948). No source from Ruth's lifetime has been located; the citation usually given is Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work (2001), p. 95. Attribution checked by Quotle.info, 22 Jul 2026 — no lifetime source located.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Babe Ruth — American baseball player · Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees. Theme: "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Every strike brings me closer to the next home run". 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 record, such as it is

Attributed to
Babe Ruth (1895–1948)
Cited to
Weird Ideas That Work (2001), p. 95
Lifetime source
None located
Wording
Circulates as both “the next home run” and “my next home run”

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

No fuller passage exists to quote — the line travels alone, with no surrounding interview, column or transcript in any source located.

Babe Ruth on Wikiquote

How we checked

  • Wikiquote ↗ lists the line in its main Quotes section with one citation only: “As quoted in Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 practices for promoting, managing, and sustaining innovation (2001) by Robert I. Sutton, p. 95.”
  • Quote Investigator’s Babe Ruth file ↗ contains three investigations — on “spell my name right,” “I had a better year than he did,” and “you just can’t beat the person who never gives up” — and none on this line. No specialist tracing exists to defer to.
  • Baseball Almanac’s sourced Ruth page ↗ omits it entirely, while attributing his “How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can…” passage to William Safire’s Words of Wisdom.
  • Babe Ruth Central ↗, operated by BR3 Enterprises, LLC and developed in cooperation with CMG Worldwide, the Babe Ruth League, the Babe Ruth Museum and the Ruth families, builds a whole page around the quote and still supplies no source or date for it.

Rights cannot be assessed because the origin of the wording is unknown. No work published in Ruth’s lifetime has been shown to contain this sentence, so there is no first-publication date to test — and quotle.info will not label a line public domain on the strength of an untraced attribution. The 2001 book in which it is quoted is itself in copyright, but that establishes nothing about the sentence’s own origin.

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.

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Fact-check

What the paper trail actually shows

Nobody else is claiming this sentence — the problem is that nobody can show where Ruth said it. The trail runs backwards only as far as modern motivational publishing.

Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work (2001) modern source

Wikiquote ↗ attaches exactly one citation to the line: “As quoted in Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 practices for promoting, managing, and sustaining innovation (2001) by Robert I. Sutton, p. 95.” That is a book about corporate creativity published decades after Ruth’s death in 1948 — it records that the quote was in circulation, not where it came from.

Sourced baseball reference collections absent

Baseball Almanac’s Ruth quotation page ↗, which attaches book sources to the Ruth lines it does carry, does not include this one at all.

Babe Ruth Central (BR3 Enterprises, LLC) no source

The estate-affiliated page ↗ calls it a well-known motivational quote and offers no source, date or context — and renders it as “Every Strike Brings Me Closer to My Next Home Run.”

“the next home run” vs “my next home run” variant

The estate page uses “my next home run” while the quote databases and Wikiquote ↗ use “the next home run.” Wording that drifts between reputable repeaters is a hallmark of a line passed on by memory rather than transcript.

The sentiment is authentically Ruth’s; the sentence is not documented as his. If you want a Ruth line that survives the same test, use the one Quote Investigator traced ↗ to Ruth’s own July 1940 essay “Bat It Out!” in The Rotarian: “You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.”

Context

Why this one sticks

Ruth genuinely did make peace with the strikeout — that is the historically solid part. He led the American League in strikeouts repeatedly while rewriting the home-run record, and the version of this idea that quote collections do attach a book source to — even if that book is a modern anthology — has his voice all over it: “I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.” Baseball Almanac carries the fuller passage ↗, sourcing it only to William Safire’s Words of Wisdom — an anthology published long after Ruth’s death, not a lifetime record.

“Every strike brings me closer to the next home run” is that same thought, filed down into something a slide deck can use. It is tidier, more portable and more obviously motivational than anything Ruth is on record as saying — which is a familiar signature of a line that was smoothed into shape by later retelling rather than transcribed from a ballpark.

The idea is Ruth’s. The sentence has no ticket stub.

Read the full story

Two details are worth knowing before you quote it. First, the wording is unstable: the Babe Ruth Estate–affiliated site runs it as “Every Strike Brings Me Closer to My Next Home Run,” while Wikiquote and the quote databases we checked use “the next home run.” Genuine transcribed remarks tend to have one wording; folklore drifts.

Second, Wikiquote files the line in its plain Quotes section rather than its Disputed section — but the only citation attached is a 2001 book about corporate innovation, which is evidence of circulation, not of origin.

Explore

Filed under

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

Failure Resilience Hope

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.

Babe Ruth — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the quote with a single citation: Robert I. Sutton's Weird Ideas That Work (2001), p. 95 — no lifetime source.
Babe Ruth Quotes — Baseball Almanacwww.baseball-almanac.com

A sourced Ruth collection that does not contain this line, but does carry the documented “I swing as hard as I can” passage.
Quote Investigator: Babe Ruthquoteinvestigator.com

QI's full Ruth file — three investigations, none of them this quote; it has never been traced by QI.
QI: “You Just Can’t Beat the Person Who Never Gives Up”quoteinvestigator.com

What a documented Ruth quotation looks like: traced to a July 1940 article under his byline in The Rotarian.
Babe Ruth Central — the quote pagewww.baberuthcentral.com

The estate-affiliated site presents it as a well-known motivational quote and supplies no source, date or context.

The true author?

About Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth

1895–1948 · American baseball player · Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees

George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr. remade baseball in the 1920s by treating the strikeout as an acceptable price for the home run — an approach that made him the sport’s first modern celebrity. He was a prolific talker to sportswriters and put his name to magazine pieces and a 1940 article in The Rotarian whose line “You just can’t beat the person who never gives up” Quote Investigator was able to document ↗. That volume of talk is exactly why so many unsourced aphorisms now travel under his name.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best-available citation

Best-available citation: Babe Ruth, quoted in Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (2001), 95 — the source given by Wikiquote. No source from Ruth's lifetime (1895–1948) has been located.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Every strike brings me closer to the next home run’?” Last verified 22 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/every-strike-brings-me-closer-to-the-next-home-run/

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