question: “What do you think of your team’s execution coach?” To which McKay replied, “I’m in favor of it.”
—I found that legendary Mets’ coach Casey Stengel is also believed to have said it.
Intrigued, I emailed the gifted etymologist Barry Popik, who’d written a blogpost on the quote, and he in turn queried fellow etymologists Ben Zimmerand Garson O’Toole. In short order, these three researchers found the earliest known references to the quote, which derived not from McKay orStengel, but from a cartoon about a girl playing the piano, printed in an Oregon newspaper, in 1894.