“One good pitch”

From The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship by David Halberstam:

In his playing days, he would be there every day in the clubhouse, holding forth — the Ted Williams Lescture Series — at least a speech per day, orating and arguing at the same time. Mel Parnell, the great Boston lefty, told me you failed to listen to him at your own risk, because for all the stuff you did not need to hear, there was always so much to learn, often about hitters on the other team, because he was so smart, and he missed nothing that happened on a ball field.

“I can,” John Pesky said 60 years after he heard the basic lecture for the first time, “still hear him telling us, because he said it again and again, ‘You’ll only get one good pitch to hit. One good pitch. That’s all. Don’t count on more. So you better know the strike zone. And when you get that one good pitch you better hit it and hit it hard. Remember, just one good pitch.'”