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Who really said it

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided

Attributed to Casey Stengel 1890–1975 · Baseball manager — Yankees, Mets · Hall of Fame, 1966
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Everyone credits Stengel, including the institutions that ought to know: the National Baseball Hall of Fame ↗ and SABR ↗ both print a version of it as his answer when asked how he managed. Neither gives a date, a game, a column or a page — and no primary source has been found carrying this sentence in Stengel’s own recorded words.

Last verified 8 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided” attributed to Casey Stengel (1890–1975). Widely credited to him and printed as his by the Baseball Hall of Fame, but no primary source has been located; the earliest printing found is a 1976 book, about a year after his death. 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 Casey Stengel — Outfielder turned manager · Ten pennants in twelve Yankee seasons. Theme: "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided". 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 "The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided". 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

What the paper trail actually shows

Credited to
Casey Stengel
Primary source
None located
Earliest printing found
Behind Closed Doors (Atheneum, 1976)
Earliest printing crediting Stengel
Sports Quotes and Caught by Keating (both 1979)
Wording
Unstable — five/five, five/four, guys / folks / people / ones

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided. No primary source

No fuller context survives, because no source records the moment it was said. The form above is one of several in circulation; Baseball Almanac ↗ prints it with “the guys who are undecided,” while Goodreads ↗ has “the folks who hate you away from the ones who haven’t made up their minds yet.”

Baseball Hall of Fame — Casey Stengel

How we verified this

  • The National Baseball Hall of Fame ↗ gives the line as Stengel’s reply when asked to divulge his managerial strategy, in the form “Keep the five guys who hate you away from the five who are undecided.” It attaches no date and no source. SABR’s BioProject essay ↗ carries the identical five-and-five wording, also uncited — the two most authoritative baseball bodies repeat the same sentence and neither says where it came from.
  • Wikiquote’s Casey Stengel page ↗ sources every entry to a dated newspaper or book, and does not carry this line at all. The nearest thing it does source is a different remark on the same theme, from the December 1964 Winter Meetings: Stengel broke a club into a first fifteen who need no managing, a next five to butter up, and a last five “plotting to get you fired.” That is recalled by Cleveland Press reporter Bob Sudyk in The Hartford Courant of 14 March 1993.
  • Searching the Internet Archive’s scanned-book index for the phrase returns only secondary repetitions — quotation anthologies, business and management titles, joke collections — never a contemporaneous report of Stengel saying it. The earliest printing we could reach is Bob Woolf’s Behind Closed Doors (Atheneum, 1976) ↗, about a year after Stengel died, in the form “the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided.” The earliest printings we found that attach his name are two 1979 anthologies, Sports Quotes (Omnibus Press) ↗ and Caught by Keating (Deutsch) ↗ — both giving “hate your guts,” both uncited. That index holds books only, not newspapers, so this is a floor on the printed record rather than a firm first appearance.

We cannot assert a copyright status, because we cannot identify the work this sentence first appeared in. Nothing here should be read as a public-domain clearance: if the line really is Stengel’s, the first publication that captured it is unknown, and the anthologies that carry it today are themselves in copyright.

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 actually goes wrong with this one

Almost nobody credits this to anyone but Stengel — though at least one 1979 anthology prints a variant under Billy Martin’s name. What goes wrong is subtler: a line with no source has been repeated so confidently, for so long, that it now reads as documented when it never was.

Casey Stengel — credited, never cited Unsourced

Both the Hall of Fame ↗ and SABR ↗ print it as his, and neither supplies a date, an interviewer or a publication. Two authoritative repetitions of an uncited sentence do not add up to a source.

No two books agree Mis-worded

Across the Internet Archive’s book index the count shifts between five-and-five and five-and-four, “undecided” swaps with “haven’t made up their minds,” and “guys” becomes “folks,” “people” or “ones.” The exact form asked about here — the ones who are undecided — is genuinely rare, while the numberless “guys … guys” version is the commonest of all, which is why this page’s wording reads almost like a slip of it. (Exact-phrase item counts in that index, retrieved September 2026: numberless 136, five-and-five 86, five-and-four 19, this page’s form 3.)

Stengel’s December 1964 clubhouse remark Different quote

Stengel really did have a documented theory of managing a twenty-five man roster, and it is not this sentence: it splits the club into fifteen, five and five, and it is sourced on Wikiquote ↗ to the 1964 Winter Meetings via a 1993 Hartford Courant recollection. The famous one-liner looks like a tightened, anonymous rewrite of that idea, but no source connects them.

Billy Martin Competing credit

Sports Quotes (Omnibus Press, 1979) ↗ prints “Keep the five players who hate you away from the four who are undecided” under “Billy Martin, baseball manager” — while crediting a near-identical line to Stengel elsewhere in the same volume; Sportswit (1984) repeats the Martin credit. Martin played for Stengel’s Yankees and later managed them himself, which is the likeliest route for the two names to blur. It is a thin claim against an overwhelming Stengel consensus, but it is a claim, and it is in print.

Honest verdict: probably Stengel, provably nobody’s documented words. Until someone turns up a dated column, broadcast or book page, the strongest true statement is that the Hall of Fame ↗ credits him and the record does not confirm him.

Context

Why a manager would say it

Stengel spent twelve seasons deciding which of twenty-five men played, and the arithmetic of that job is brutal: nine start, the rest wait, and resentment collects at the far end of the bench. A manager who lasted as long as he did was managing the unhappy as much as the talented.

That is why the line rings true even without a source. It is not really about hatred — it is about containment: keep the aggrieved from recruiting the merely uncertain, and you keep a clubhouse. The trouble is that a sentence being plausible is exactly what lets it travel unchecked for forty years.

Probably Stengel. Provably nobody’s documented words.

Why a quote like this is so hard to pin down

Stengel is one of the most quotable figures in American sport, and “Stengelese” was famously loose — long, circling, self-interrupting. Reporters routinely tidied him up for print. A polished epigram in his mouth is therefore always suspect: the neater the sentence, the likelier a writer shaped it.

There is also a structural gap in the evidence. Full-text search covers scanned books well and newspapers poorly, so a line that first ran in a 1950s sports column could sit unindexed while its later anthology reprints surface instantly. The 1976 date below is the earliest printing we could reach, not a claim about where the line began.

Explore

Filed under

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

Leadership Power Wisdom

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.

Casey Stengel — Hall of Fame biographybaseballhall.org

The institutional source that prints the five-and-five version as Stengel's answer on managerial strategy — with no citation.
Casey Stengel — SABR BioProjectsabr.org

Book-length scholarly biography carrying the same uncited wording, plus the full managerial record from Worcester in 1925 to the Mets in 1965.
Casey Stengel — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Rigorously sourced quote page that does not include this line, and does source his different December 1964 remark on managing a roster.
Casey Stengel quotationsbaseball-almanac.com

Prints the popular short form verbatim with no source, while citing books and dates for other Stengel lines on the same page.
Full-text book search for the phraseopenlibrary.org

Search inside the Internet Archive's scanned books: every hit is a secondary repetition — quotation anthology, business or management title, joke collection — never a contemporaneous report of him saying it.
Casey Stengel — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Career and life dates: born 30 July 1890, died 29 September 1975, ten pennants in twelve Yankee seasons, Hall of Fame 1966.

The man it is pinned on

Casey Stengel

Casey Stengel

1890–1975 · Outfielder turned manager · Ten pennants in twelve Yankee seasons

Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel was born in Kansas City in 1890, reached the majors with Brooklyn in 1912, and finished playing with the Boston Braves in 1925 before starting over as a manager. His first two decades in the job went mostly badly — the Dodgers 1934–1936, the Braves 1938–1943 — and then the Yankees hired him in October 1948 and he won ten pennants in twelve seasons, including five consecutive World Series titles from 1949 through 1953. He closed out with the expansion Mets from 1962 to 1965 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966. Sportswriters called him the Ol’ Perfessor, and his looping, digressive way of talking is a large part of why so many crisply-worded aphorisms ended up with his name under them.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

How to cite this

No primary source located. Earliest printing found in a search of the Internet Archive scanned-book index: Bob Woolf, Behind Closed Doors (New York: Atheneum, 1976), in the variant form "the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided." The earliest printings located that credit Stengel by name are Don Atyeo and Jonathon Green, eds., Sports Quotes (London: Omnibus Press, 1979) and Caught by Keating: Sporting Quotations from the Seventies (London: Deutsch, 1979). Attributed without citation in the National Baseball Hall of Fame's Casey Stengel biography and in SABR's BioProject essay.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the ones who are undecided’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-secret-of-managing-is-to-keep-the-guys-who-hate-you/

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