You have to play this game [baseball] right. You have to think right. You’re not trying to pull the ball all the time. You’re not thinking, Hey, we’re going to kill them tomorrow–because that may not happen. You’re not looking to do something all on your own. You’ve got to take it one game at a time, one hitter at a time. You’ve got to go on doing the things you’ve talked about beforehand. You can’t get three outs at a time or five runs at a time. You’ve got to concentrate on each play, each hitter, each pitch. All this makes the game much slower and much clearer. It breaks it down to its smallest part. If you take the game like that–one pitch, one hitter, one inning at a time, and then one game at a time–the next thing you know, you look up and you’ve won.
Catcher Rick Dempsey quoted in George Will, Men at Work, p. 4.
Jeff Gissing 