Screen Directors Playhouse (TV Series)

Rookie of the Year (1955)

John Wayne: Mike Cronin

Photos 

Quotes 

• Mike Cronin : I got it! The biggest sports yarn since David KO'd Goliath!

• Mike Cronin : You don't forget the Black Sox. And you don't forget that newskid who waited outside the clubhouse with tears runnin' down his face to choke out, "Buck - it ain't true, is it?"

• Mike Cronin : You're tired. Why don't you sit down?... Well, go ahead. I'm what you'd call a captive audience.

• Mike Cronin : What do you expect me to dig out of Emeryville, Pennsylvania? The love life of the girls' softball team?

• Mike Cronin : You're out of the rookie class, kid. You're a regular on any man's team.

  Lyn Goodhue : Well, I hope I can live up to the uniform. It's what I've been hoping for all my life.

• Ruth Dahlberg : How can a man be so evil? How can you honestly be so evil?

  Mike Cronin : I'm a newspaperman. I don't make the facts - just report them.

• Mike Cronin : Not one thing in that story against the kid.

  Ruth Dahlberg : No. Only that his father was kicked out of baseball for life, because he was once weak enough to take a bribe.

  Mike Cronin : You're too young to realize how close the Black Sox scandal came to killing a great game!

  Ruth Dahlberg : But that's over and done with! It's forgotten now. If you're so concerned about baseball, why bring it up, after all these years?

• Willie : The press box of the Yankee Stadium? On the Opening Day of the Series! Wow, would I like to be there now!

  Mike Cronin : Well, kid, maybe I can fix it for you. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe the third or fourth day.

  Willie : Are you kiddin'?

  Mike Cronin : You think I'd kid about a sacred thing like that? Haven't we been workin' together, man and boy, for five months now?

• Mike Cronin : You never played in the minors, Lyn.

  Lyn Goodhue : I played with 'em, not in 'em.

  Mike Cronin : What?

  Lyn Goodhue : That's my one and only joke. You see, Coaltown's a coal mining town. I played on the home team; that's why I said... oh, jeez...

  Mike Cronin : ... Coaltown. That's in, uh...

  Lyn Goodhue : West Virginia, sir.

  Mike Cronin : Oh, you don't have to call me sir. Makes me feel like Methuselah. Or back in the army; I don't know which is worse.

  Lyn Goodhue : I'm sorry; you're not so old. I mean, for a man your age, you look OK.

• Mike Cronin : No 'one more' anything. I've been takin' it here for ten years! Stuck! Trapped! I've got just three words for you, Mr. Cully: Drop dead.

• Mike Cronin : [as he types]  Hey - quit readin' over my shoulder; bad manners.

  Willie : What is it? A novel? Cowboys and Indians?

  Mike Cronin : No. You can call it a passport - a ticket from here to there. Maybe a stay of execution. But whatever you call it, it's manna from heaven!

• Mike Cronin : He's good, Buck. But he'll never be as good as you were.

  Larry 'Buck' Goodhue : That's where you're wrong, mister. He's better right now than I ever was.

  Mike Cronin : I'd like to quote you saying that.

  Larry 'Buck' Goodhue : Newspaperman, huh? No newspaperman ever did me any good - before or after the trouble.

  Mike Cronin : It's our job to print the news.

  Larry 'Buck' Goodhue : I didn't say it wasn't.