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Who really said it

There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder

Spoken by Ted Williams 1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox left fielder, the last man to bat .400
Verified In copyright

Williams said it at Fenway Park on his last day as a player, answering a reporter Linn names only as Chase, who had reminded him he was about to become a batting coach; Ed Linn printed the exchange in his SPORT magazine account “The Kid’s Last Game” (February 1961), reprinted with the dialogue intact in at least eight later anthologies. The headline form is how the line circulates; Linn sets it as two sentences, and his full four-sentence answer is quoted in the source panel. It does not come from The Science of Hitting.

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

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Verified quote & credit

“There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder” Ted Williams (1918–2002), quoted by Ed Linn in "The Kid's Last Game," SPORT, February 1961 — reprinted in The Best of Sport, 1946–1971, p. 186. · Verbatim: “There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter. But I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder. More mistakes are made in hitting than in any other part of the game.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Ed Linn and the successors to SPORT magazine's publisher; the article is © 1961 Macfadden-Bartell Corporation). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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

In context

Evoking the world of Ted Williams — Boston Red Sox left fielder · .406 in 1941 · Hall of Fame, 1966. Theme: "There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder". 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 "There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder". 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 source

Work
“The Kid’s Last Game”
Reported by
Ed Linn (1922–2000), sportswriter, quoting Williams directly
First published
SPORT magazine, February 1961
Reprinted in
The Third Fireside Book of Baseball (1968); The Best of Sport, 1946–1971 (1971), p. 186

Chase reminded Ted that he was scheduled to become a batting coach. “Can you take a .250 hitter and make a .300 hitter out of him?”
“There has always been a saying in baseball that you can’t make a hitter,” Ted answered. “But I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder. More mistakes are made in hitting than in any other part of the game.”
At this point Williams was literally encircled by photographers, amateur and pro…

Transcribed from the reprints of Linn’s article rather than from the magazine: the February 1961 issue of SPORT is not digitised, so the text here is what eight independently scanned anthologies print, read through Open Library’s full-text index. “Chase” is how Linn names the man who put the question — one of the press pack around Williams that afternoon; the article gives him no more introduction than that.

Digitised anthology
Borrow the scan at the Internet Archive
The passage as printed, in Open Library's full-text index

How we know

In copyright

Williams spoke the words in 1960, but they were first fixed and published in a 1961 magazine article, and the reprinting anthologies carry the notice “© 1961 by the Macfadden-Bartell Corporation.” We have found no evidence that the copyright was allowed to lapse, so treat the passage as in copyright — quotable in short extract with attribution, not as public domain.

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 goes wrong with it

Nothing here is fabricated — the wording is Williams’s own, on the record. What travels badly is the sourcing, a word dropped from the last sentence, and one anthology’s rewrite.

AZQuotes, and the aggregators downstream of it unsourced

AZQuotes ↗ attaches no publication to the line at all — its stated source is IMDb’s ‘Personal Quotes’ list. That is the provenance behind most web copies: an aggregator citing an aggregator, never the 1961 article.

AZQuotes, BrainyQuote and the copies downstream of them reworded

The web copies do carry the closing sentence — but a preposition falls out of it. AZQuotes ↗ and BrainyQuote ↗ both print “More mistakes are made hitting than in any other part of the game.” The reprints of Linn’s article read “made in hitting” ↗, which is the version to quote.

The Gigantic Book of Baseball Quotations variant

Wayne Stewart’s collection welds two sentences into one — “you can improve a hitter more than you can improve a fielder” — which turns a flat statement plus an aside into a single comparative claim. Linn prints them as separate sentences, as the two wordings side by side ↗ show. In fairness, the headline form at the top of this page compresses too, in its own smaller way — the verbatim text is set out above.

Williams's hitting manual, The Science of Hitting not there

The line is often taken for book wisdom, but it is not in the book. Open Library’s full-text index covers The Science of Hitting — the book surfaces for other phrases from its pages — yet it never appears among the results for any phrase of this quote, and Goodreads’ quote page for the book ↗ does not carry it either.

The real citation is Ed Linn, “The Kid’s Last Game,” SPORT, February 1961 — reprinted with the exchange intact in The Best of Sport, 1946–1971 ↗ and The Third Fireside Book of Baseball ↗.

Context

Why he was being asked

The question was not philosophical. Williams had just played his last game and had agreed to come back the following spring as the Red Sox batting coach, and a reporter in the scrum around him wanted to know what that job was actually worth: Can you take a .250 hitter and make a .300 hitter out of him? The famous line is the first half of a working coach’s answer — a man declining to promise miracles while refusing to accept that nothing can be taught.

The reasoning is the half nobody quotes. Williams did not simply say hitting can be improved; he said why — because hitting is where the mistakes are, and a discipline full of mistakes is a discipline with room in it. Pulled off the page as a one-line motto, it reads as vague encouragement. Taken whole, it is a claim about where coaching effort actually pays.

“More mistakes are made in hitting than in any other part of the game.”

The reprint chain, book by book

Linn’s article travelled further than most magazine journalism. It was anthologised in The Third Fireside Book of Baseball (Charles Einstein, 1968) and again in The Baseball Reader: Favorites from the Fireside Books of Baseball; in The Best of Sport, 1946–1971 (Al Silverman) and The Twentieth Century Treasury of Sports; in Sport Magazine’s All-Time All Stars (Tom Murray); in The Ted Williams Reader and Ted Williams: Reflections on a Splendid Life (Lawrence Baldassaro); and in Glenn Stout’s Impossible Dreams: A Red Sox Collection. Linn later reused the scene in his own biography Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams.

The reprints preserve the exchange word for word, which is how the wording can be checked without the magazine: the same sentences appear in eight separately scanned books, and the small divergences between them are optical-recognition noise rather than editorial change.

Explore

Filed under

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

Growth Work Knowledge

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.

The passage in Open Library's full-text indexopenlibrary.org

Snippets of the printed page from fifteen scans, including The Third Fireside Book of Baseball and Ed Linn's own biography.
The Best of Sport, 1946–1971 (scan)archive.org

Al Silverman's anthology, where Linn's article begins on page 186. Borrowable scan at the Internet Archive.
The Third Fireside Book of Baseball (scan)archive.org

Charles Einstein's 1968 anthology, whose acknowledgments credit the article to Ed Linn and Sport Magazine, © 1961.
Ted Williams on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Does not carry this line in any section — a reminder that absence from Wikiquote is not evidence a quote is fake.
Quote Investigator search: “make a hitter”quoteinvestigator.com

The quote-tracing specialists have never written this one up; the search returns unrelated articles only.
Ted Williamsen.wikipedia.org

Career record, the .406 season, the 28 September 1960 finale and the 1966 Hall of Fame election.

The true author

The man who said it

Ted Williams

1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox left fielder · .406 in 1941 · Hall of Fame, 1966

Ted Williams spent his whole major-league career with the Boston Red Sox, won six batting titles and two Triple Crowns, and in 1941 hit .406 — still the last .400 season in the majors. Two stretches of his prime went to the Marine Corps: a flight instructor in the Second World War, a combat pilot in Korea. He homered in his final at-bat on 28 September 1960, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966 in his first year of eligibility, and later managed the Washington Senators.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Ed Linn, “The Kid’s Last Game,” SPORT, February 1961; reprinted in Charles Einstein, ed., The Third Fireside Book of Baseball (1968), and in Al Silverman, comp., The Best of Sport, 1946–1971 (1971), 186.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There has always been a saying in baseball that you can't make a hitter, but I think you can improve a hitter. More than you can improve a fielder’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-has-always-been-a-saying-in-baseball-that-you-cant/

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