It's a very big mental game, all day leading up to warm-ups. You're not sure if your curveball will break, or will you be able to throw it over the plate? It's all negative thoughts going into the game.
Managing can be more discouraging than playing, especially when you're losing because when you're a player, there are at least individual goals you can shoot for. When you're a manager all the worries of the team become your worries.
In regards to core training, I try to incorporate the medicine ball whenever possible. As a baseball player, there is a lot of twisting and turning that I will do. Keeping my abs strong is as important as anything else.
Preparation is very important. The pitcher is going to do his job and prepare for you, so you as a hitter must do the same. I always watch videotape of pitchers before the game and even sometimes during.
Mike Matheny, Fernando Vina, Edgar Renteria, Mark McGwire and Darryl Kile... before he died. Those guys took me under their wing and taught me the way to play the game the right way.
I have to go with the approach I had in Triple-A. I need to take a lot of those fastballs I am seeing to left field. Also must gear up for the changeup and take them up the middle.
It's the only way I think I'm ever going to walk away from the game, is to go ahead and say I'm going to, and then I've got to. There's no turning back now - win, lose or draw.
The two biggest things that translate from the pitching mound to hunting and fishing are patience and perseverance. When you're on the mound, you have to take the game one pitch at a time, regardless of the score, and that approach helps when I'm in ...
I think I have already signed some scrap of paper for every man, woman, and child in the United States. What do they do with all those scraps of paper with my signature on it?
You sweat out the free agent thing in November then you make the trades in December. Then you struggle to sign the guys left in January and in February I get down to sewing all the new numbers on the uniforms.
A guitar is not a baseball bat, despite me being known as the Babe Ruth of music. And if some have called me the Beethoven of coffee, I haven’t heard it because I’m deaf to their praise.
You know that old saying about home being where the heart is? I don’t think that refers to your own. It’s the hearts of other people, the ones you love, that makes a home.
To the untrained eye, Ben had nothing, at least by the bizarre rules that governed high school. But really, Ben was one of the few who wasn't pretending, one of the few who was free.
Lover’s Lane is so narrow only unicycles can travel down it. My high school teachers didn’t call me “The Babe Ruth of the Bicycle” for nothing. It’s too bad they didn’t call me that, because it was accurate.
I don't recommend steroids for everyone, and I don't recommend growth hormones for everyone. But for certain individuals, I truly believe, because I've experimented with it for so many years, that it can make an average athlete a super athlete. It ca...
My fingers are too short to enable me to get grip enough on the ball to pitch a deep curve, so that I have been compelled to depend more on drops, straight balls and the different artifices known to pitchers to deceive the batter.
I wasn't playing mind games with anybody, I just said what I said. I am responsible for it, but I wish everybody would fall asleep for that one and let me go out there and do my thing.
There's very few pitching coaches that I worked with that actually came out on the mound and told me what I was doing wrong with the knuckleball. Because they just didn't know. So I had to figure it out. I was on my own.
I actually went to some Gamblers Anonymous classes, and I sat there for three or four of them, and I'm trying to figure out what I have in similarities with these other people, and I could never find anything. It just seems like it wasn't the right p...
I'm flattered that so many baseball people think I'm a Hall of Famer. But what's hard to believe is how one-hundred and fifty plus people have changed their minds about me since I became eligible, because I haven't had a base hit since then.
I was an extroverted kid and performed, like, acting and singing. Then, the older I got, I realized I enjoyed performing things that I came up with myself more and I enjoyed making people laugh more than making people cry or think.
