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Who really said it

Without losers, where would the winners be?

Attributed to Casey Stengel 1890–1975 · Hall of Fame baseball manager, New York Yankees and New York Mets
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

The line is credited to Stengel in Stengel-specific quotation collections, and the earliest printing we could locate — Kevin Nelson’s Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (Simon and Schuster, 1982) — already puts it in his mouth, alongside his own Senate-testimony riff. But nothing from Stengel’s lifetime records him saying it: no date, no ballpark, no interview, no newspaper report.

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

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Without losers, where would the winners be?” attributed to Casey Stengel (1890–1975). Widely credited to him and in keeping with his New York Mets years, but no source from his lifetime records it; the earliest printing located is Kevin Nelson's "Baseball's Greatest Quotes" (Simon and Schuster, 1982). One 2010 anthology credits the line to Bill Veeck instead. 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 Casey Stengel — Baseball manager · New York Yankees and New York Mets. Theme: "Without losers, where would the winners be?". 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 "Without losers, where would the winners be?". 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 earliest printing we could find

Earliest located printing
Baseball’s Greatest Quotes
Compiled by
Kevin Nelson · Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982
Also printed in
The Gospel According to Casey
Original occasion
None documented — no date, venue, interview or report

“Without losers,” he philosophized, “where would the winners be?” No primary source

As the line reads in Kevin Nelson’s Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (1982), where it sits beside Stengel’s celebrated Senate-testimony riff — “I became a major league manager in several cities and was discharged. We call it discharged…” — in a run of his own quotations. The bare form “Without losers, where would the winners be?” is what later collections print.

Wikiquote: Casey Stengel

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote lists the line among Casey Stengel’s quotes and sources it to The Gospel According to Casey (1992), ed. Berkow & Kaplan, St. Martin’s Press, p. 19, as cited in The Executive’s Book of Quotations (1994), ed. Martin & Moskin, Oxford University Press, p. 299 — see the entry ↗. The page has no “Disputed” or “Misattributed” section.
  • Both of those books are late. The earliest printing we could locate is a decade older: Kevin Nelson’s Baseball’s Greatest Quotes (Simon and Schuster, 1982), scanned at the Internet Archive ↗ — still after Stengel’s death in 1975.
  • A full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books ↗ returns no printing of the phrase earlier than that 1982 anthology, in any attribution.
  • Quote Investigator has no article on this quote, so there is no specialist tracing to defer to — the strongest documented claim available is “printed as Stengel’s from 1982,” not “said by Stengel on a known day.”

No original utterance or first publication can be established, so no copyright status can be asserted for the sentence itself. What is certain is that it is not in the public domain by age: Stengel lived from 1890 to 1975, and every located printing — the 1982 Nelson anthology, the 1992 Gospel According to Casey, the 1994 Executive’s Book of Quotations — falls well after 1931. Those individual editions remain in copyright to their own publishers and compilers.

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 the credit actually rests on

Nobody has shown this line is wrong. What is missing is the other half — any record of Stengel saying it. Every printing we could find postdates his death in 1975, and the credit travels without an occasion attached.

Undocumented no primary source

No speech, interview, newspaper report, book or broadcast from Stengel’s lifetime has been tied to this sentence. A full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books ↗ surfaces the phrase only in printings from 1982 onward.

Bill Veeck rival attribution

Peter Handrinos’s The Funniest Baseball Book Ever (Andrews McMeel, 2010) prints the identical sentence and credits it to the club owner Bill Veeck, not Stengel — see the scanned edition ↗. No earlier Veeck source supports it either, so this reads as drift rather than a correction.

Reference sites and quote aggregators

Encyclopedia.com’s Stengel entry prints the line with no citation at all ↗, pairing it with his “only thing worse than a Mets game” crack. That is the usual pattern: the quote is repeated, the sourcing never is.

The honest verdict: the credit to Stengel is old, consistent and plausible — the 1982 anthology that first prints it ↗ already sets it among his own lines — but it is a credit, not a record. Until a source from his lifetime turns up, this stays attributed rather than verified.

Context

Why it sounds exactly like him

Stengel took over the New York Mets in 1962, their first season, and the team lost 120 games — a twentieth-century record. He managed them through 1965, and his job in those years was less about winning than about selling the loss: turning a hopeless expansion club into something New York could love. A one-line shrug that reframes losing as a public service is precisely the register he worked in.

That is also the trap. A quip this well-fitted to a man’s legend is the kind that attaches to him whether or not he coined it — and in this case the attribution shows up only in anthologies compiled after his death, never in a contemporaneous report.

A line that fits the legend too well is a line worth checking.

What we searched, and what we did not find

A full-text search of the Internet Archive’s scanned-book corpus for the exact phrase returns printings only from 1982 onward. Nothing in it predates Stengel’s death in 1975.

Quote Investigator has no article on this line, and Wikiquote’s Casey Stengel page carries no “Disputed” or “Misattributed” section at all — so there is no specialist finding to defer to in either direction. The absence of a debunking is not evidence the quote is genuine; it means nobody has traced it.

No newspaper archive we could reach returned a period printing. Several archives — HathiTrust, the Google Books API, and per-item search inside restricted archive.org scans — refused access rather than returning nothing, so their silence is not evidence either.

Explore

Filed under

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

Success Failure Humility

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 — Casey Stengelen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line among Stengel’s quotes and gives the citation chain to The Gospel According to Casey (1992) and The Executive’s Book of Quotations (1994).
Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1982)archive.org

Kevin Nelson’s anthology, Simon and Schuster, 1982 — the earliest printing of the line we could locate.
The Gospel According to Casey (1992)archive.org

Berkow and Kaplan’s Stengel compilation, St. Martin’s Press — the source Wikiquote cites for the quote.
The Funniest Baseball Book Ever (2010)archive.org

Peter Handrinos’s anthology, which prints the same sentence credited to Bill Veeck rather than Stengel.
Full-text search for the phraseopenlibrary.org

Live search inside the Internet Archive’s scanned books — every printing it surfaces is 1982 or later.
SABR — Casey Stengel biographysabr.org

Society for American Baseball Research life-and-career biography: dates, the Yankees years, and the 1962 Mets’ 120 losses.

The Ol’ Perfessor

About Casey Stengel

Casey Stengel

1890–1975 · Baseball manager · New York Yankees and New York Mets

Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel won ten pennants and seven World Series managing the New York Yankees from 1949 to 1960, then took charge of the expansion New York Mets from 1962 to 1965 — a team that lost 120 games in its first season, a twentieth-century record for futility. His circular, clause-piling way of talking was famous enough to earn its own name, Stengelese, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966. That reputation as baseball’s great wit is exactly why lines drift toward him: a good one-sentence gag about losing sounds like Stengel whether or not he ever said it.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest located printing

Earliest located printing: Kevin Nelson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotes: The Wit, Wisdom, and Wisecracks of America’s National Pastime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). Also printed in Ira Berkow and Jim Kaplan, eds., The Gospel According to Casey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). No source from Stengel’s lifetime located.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Without losers, where would the winners be?’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/without-losers-where-would-the-winners-be/

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