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Who really said it

They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays

Attributed to Ted Williams 1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox left fielder, 19-time All-Star
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Every printing credits Ted Williams, no one else has ever been proposed, and the sentiment sits comfortably with a man who was a 19-time All-Star himself. But no speech, interview, column, broadcast or book page has ever been attached to it: Quote Investigator has no article on it ↗, English Wikiquote keeps it off the article entirely, and the oldest printing we could locate is a 1982 quotation anthology that supplies no source of its own.

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

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Unconfirmed quote & credit

“They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays” attributed to Ted Williams (1918–2002). No primary source has been identified; the earliest printing located is Kevin Nelson, Baseball's Greatest Quotes (Simon and Schuster, 1982), where the line appears with no source. Via Quotle.info.

Can you use it?

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 left fielder · Hall of Fame, 1966. Theme: "They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays". 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 "They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays". 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

Where the trail ends

Primary source
None located — no speech, interview, column, broadcast or book page has ever been attached
Earliest printing located
Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (Simon and Schuster, 1982)
Quote Investigator
No article on this quotation
Wikiquote
Absent from the Ted Williams article; listed under “Unsourced” on its talk page

They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays. No surrounding context on record

There is no fuller passage to show. In fifteen of the nineteen printings located in the Internet Archive’s scanned book corpus the line stands alone as a single free-standing sentence, introduced by some variant of “Ted Williams once said” and followed by the author’s own commentary; the remaining four are an almanac page, a calendar entry, a devotional and a novel. Not one of the nineteen follows it with a date, a game, or a citation.

Open Library: every scanned printing of the line

How the attribution travels

Because the origin of the wording is undetermined, no copyright status can honestly be asserted here. If Williams did say it, it was a short spoken remark of unknown date and setting; what we can point to is the printings, and those are in copyright — the earliest located, Kevin Nelson’s Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (Simon and Schuster, 1982) ↗, along with every later anthology that repeats it.

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

Not a wrong name — a missing source

This is not the usual case of a line pinned on the wrong famous person. Nobody has ever credited it to anyone but Ted Williams. What has gone wrong is the paperwork: a citation chain that loops back on itself, a bare aggregator entry treated as evidence, and a novel that gets read as a source.

Simple English Wikiquote circular

Lists the line under “Sourced quotes,” which reads as a verification. The footnote points to a Baseball Almanac quotations page — see the reference for yourself ↗. English Wikiquote reaches the opposite conclusion and keeps the line off the article altogether, listing it on its talk page under “Unsourced” ↗.

Baseball Almanac no source

Prints “They invented the All-Star Game for Willie Mays.” — Ted Williams with no date, game or publication, on a page where neighbouring quotations do carry sources ↗, one of them credited to Charles Einstein in The Fireside Book of Baseball (1956). The site sources what it can; it does not source this.

Cooperstown (2005), a novel fiction

Eugena Pilek's novel has a character say “Ted Williams said ‘they invented the all-star game for Willie Mays.’” It surfaces in full-text book searches ↗ alongside the non-fiction hits, and gets picked up as a book citation complete with a page number. A novel repeating a floating quotation is not provenance.

The reprint anthologies drift

The phrasing wobbles in exactly the way orally transmitted lines do. Across the scanned printings ↗ you find “All-Star Game-for Willie Mays” and a split between capital “Game” and lower-case “game”; widen the search by one word ↗ and a version turns up that drops Mays’s surname altogether and ends at “for Willie.” No fixed text is being copied — a remembered sentence is.

No one has ever credited this sentence to anybody but Ted Williams — and no one has ever recorded where he said it. Until someone produces a game story, a column, a transcript or a page, “attributed” is the honest label. See every printing we could find ↗.

Context

Why the line stuck

It is one of the shortest and largest compliments in baseball. Not he was great in All-Star Games — the whole institution existed as a stage for one man. And the numbers do not embarrass it: the Baseball Hall of Fame calls Willie Mays a 24-time All-Star ↗ who won the game's MVP award in 1963 and again in 1968, and he still holds or shares the career All-Star marks for at bats, runs, hits, total bases, triples and extra-base hits ↗.

It also sounds right coming from Ted Williams, which is exactly the property that lets a quotation travel without papers. Williams was a 19-time All-Star with his own claim on the game's history, and his Red Sox career ended after the 1960 season while Mays kept turning up in All-Star line-ups into the 1970s — so the remark reads as something said looking back, not something said in the moment. That is as far as the evidence goes. Nearly every book that repeats it introduces it the same way: Ted Williams once said. None of them says when, where, or to whom.

The compliment is perfect. The paper trail is empty.

What we actually searched

A full-text search of the Internet Archive's scanned book corpus for the exact phrase returns nineteen books. Reading every snippet: fifteen introduce it with some form of “Ted Williams once said,” one is a page of a quotation almanac, one is a daily-thought calendar entry, one is a devotional, and one is a novel in which a character quotes it. Not one is a biography of Mays or of Williams, and not one carries a citation.

There is a single exception worth flagging honestly. John Rosengren's Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid (2008) is the only book in that set that attaches an endnote marker to the sentence. The scan is lending-restricted and we could not open the note, so we do not know what it cites — it remains the most promising lead anyone with library access could chase.

Explore

Filed under

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

Success Character

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.

Quote Investigator — site search for “Willie Mays”quoteinvestigator.com

The specialists have never investigated this line. The site search returns two hits — the Tallulah Bankhead “two geniuses” piece and a Jesse Owens quotation that names Mays in passing — so there is no expert finding to lean on here, and none to contradict.
Wikiquote — Talk:Ted Williamsen.wikiquote.org

Where the line actually lives on English Wikiquote: a long list of Williams quotations parked under the heading “Unsourced,” not in the article itself.
Simple English Wikiquote — Ted Williamssimple.wikiquote.org

The one wiki that files it under “Sourced quotes.” Follow the footnote and it lands on Baseball Almanac — an aggregator, not a source.
Baseball Almanac — Ted Williams Quotesbaseball-almanac.com

The end of the online citation chain: the exact page Simple English Wikiquote cites as its source. The Williams line carries a source field reading “Widely Attributed,” on a page where other entries name books and magazines.
Open Library — full-text search for the phraseopenlibrary.org

Every printing of the sentence inside the Internet Archive's scanned book corpus, with snippets. Useful for seeing how uniformly sourceless the repetitions are.
Baseball Hall of Fame — Willie Maysbaseballhall.org

The official record behind the compliment: 24-time All-Star, All-Star Game MVP in 1963 and 1968, inducted 1979.

The man credited

Who was Ted Williams?

Ted Williams

1918–2002 · Boston Red Sox left fielder · Hall of Fame, 1966

Ted Williams played his whole major-league career in left field for the Boston Red Sox — 1939 to 1942 and 1946 to 1960, with the gap carved out by military service — and finished with a .344 lifetime batting average. He was selected to 19 All-Star teams and went into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1966. He knew the occasion intimately: of his walk-off home run in the 1941 All-Star Game he later said it “remains to this day the most thrilling hit of my life.” Which is part of why a one-line compliment about someone else owning that same stage sounds so much like him.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best available

No primary source identified. Earliest printing located: Kevin Nelson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotes: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of America’s National Pastime (Simon and Schuster, 1982), where the line appears with a bare “—Ted Williams” and no source of its own.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘They invented the All-Star game for Willie Mays’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/they-invented-the-all-star-game-for-willie-mays/

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