Brother Matthias had the right idea about training a baseball club. He made every boy on the team play every position in the game, including the bench. A kid might pitch a game one day and find himself behind the bat the next or perhaps out in the sun-field. You see Brother Matthias' idea was to fit a boy to jump in in any emergency and make good. So whatever I have at the bat or on the mound or in the outfield or even on the bases, I owe directly to Brother Matthias.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Brother Matthias had the right idea about training a baseball club. He made every boy on the team play every position in the game, including the bench. A kid might pitch a game one day and find himself behind the bat the next or perhaps out in the sun-field. You see Brother Matthias' idea was to fit a boy to jump in in any emergency and make good. So whatever I have at the bat or on the mound or in the outfield or even on the bases, I owe directly to Brother Matthias." in the context of "On the mentoring he received from Brother Matthias Boutlier, Prefect of Discipline at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, in "Ruth, As a Kid, Learns to Play in Any Position" by Ruth, as told to Westbrook Pegler (uncredited), in The Chicago Tribune (August 9, 1920), p. 15; reprinted as "We Did Everything," in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball (2011), p. 6" to mean that wisdom is timeless.