You get to the big leagues, and you think, 'Can I do this stuff?' Then you take the first pitch down the middle for Strike 1, and you think, 'I could have hit that.'
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
Balls and strikes are the basic tenet to everything in baseball. From the perspective of hitting, pitching, offense and defense, it's all about the strike zone and how the battle is waged there between the pitcher and hitter.
If you are without contention and still have the ability to make people think, their ego is going to take a hit and as a result they're not going to like you. They don't want to think. They want to be right, unrivaled or entertained.
The greatly anticipated 2009 Masters was like going to a Broadway hit and finding out that the star, Sir Tiger Woods, was off that night, and his replacement was the cab driver who dropped you off at the theater.
In my own case I have frequently faced the pitcher when I had no desire whatever to hit. I wanted to get a base on balls.
I grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood. So going over to friends' houses for dinner, their parents listened to Al Green and Luther Ingram. It was something that hit me early on, the feeling that came across.
Sometimes I feel like a human pin cushion. Every painful emotion hits me with ridiculously exaggerated force. And the anxiety feels like hands inside of me, squeezing my guts really hard.
I went to a radio station on Long Island in 1982, and thank goodness for me, it was so new that there was no receptionist. So the DJ opened up his booth, and took my tape and listened to it and thought it was a hit song.
I think that the one thing about 'Parenthood' is that, while it's never been a huge out-of-the-box hit, it's always been solid. We've always kept our audience.
I certainly wouldn't buy a DVD series of a hit show and start at Season 7. I would want to go back and start from the beginning.
He asked if I was a songwriter, and I said yeah, that I was in town because I'd won this contest. He said, okay, then he was gonna play me his hit, and started singing 'When it's time to relax, one beer stands clear... '
I started in for the ball but I just couldn't get it. I should have caught it because I was used to catching everything on the sandlots. But they hit the ball a lot harder in the major leagues and I just couldn't reach the ball this time.
There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
People are always coming up to me, thinking I've got some magic wand that can make them a star and I want to tell them that no one can do that. Making hit records is not that easy. But it took me time to realize that myself.
Adaption of the human body in space is not yet mastered. As soon as you hit space, you feel your body is going through a period of mutation. There's no blood in your head; you have a hard time swallowing. We're not born to naturally be in space.
Everybody said, 'You hit it so big when you were on 'Ally McBeal.' ' I didn't do anything for a year after 'Ally McBeal,' and I had to write David Kelley to get myself back on 'Ally' a second time because I thought the character should be on again.
You can watch videos and hit off the tee, stuff like that, but at the same time, it's you against the pitcher. I just need one swing or one pitch to click, and you can find your swing.
With every inch of land on Earth now catalogued by our satellites, the stars are the next place we as a species must travel. And with a booming world population that will hit 9.1 billion in 2050, large-scale space travel may become a necessity.
Ace Rothstein: [voice-over] They never know what hit them. And if, and when, they do find out that they just got zapped by a cattle prod, they wish they really did have a heart attack.
Sheeta: [Hitting both Charles and Louis in the head with a coal shovel on the train chase] Take that! Charles: [dazed] That's a strong little girl! Louis: [groaning] Uh-huh...
