These days baseball is different. You come to spring training, you get your legs ready, you arms loose, your agents ready, your lawyer lined up.
There is no way, believe me, despite my name being Winfield, and loving the game dearly. It wasn't in the cards. I didn't know what it was going to take to get here.
People I look to: again, Hank Aaron, man you challenged the status quo and the records of the game. Monumental feats in an era where people didn't like that.
We try to take it from one at-bat to the next, ya know it’s easier said than done, but all put together it looks good in the end.
I don't wish I did anything differently. The most important thing to me was to play baseball.
Some fans have a mistaken opinion of the average umpire. He is human, all reports to the contrary. Every fellow who is successful is conscientious to almost a fault.
The difference between relief pitching when I did it today is simple, there is too much of it. It's one of those cases where more is not necessarily better.
When I was playing I never wished I was doing anything else. I think being a professional athlete is the finest thing a man can do.
I could hit the damn ball. No matter who was throwing. Or where the ball was. I left the bench swinging. I didn't get many walks.
Fifty years ago, it was the dream of every bohemian artist to be seen getting out of a limousine wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Today, it's the dream of probably half the people in the country.
I guarantee you that's what Jeff Gordon does. He uses everything the fans throw at him to stoke his fire and it drives him to be better at what he does.
I was a pitcher, shortstop and outfielder, and the Yankees tried to sign me out of high school as a first-round draft pick in 1981. I turned them down to go to college.
The most cowardly thing in the world is blaming mistakes upon the umpires. Too many managers strut around on the field trying to manage the umpires instead of their teams.
There are one-hundred fifty-four games in a season and you can find one-hundred fifty-four reasons why your team should have won every one of them.
I won't be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.
Unless you have made a complete surrender and are doing his will it will avail you nothing if you've reformed a thousand times and have your name on fifty church records.
The Democratic party of Florida has put a temperance plank in its platform and the Republican party of every state would nail that plank in their platform if they thought it would carry the election.
Pitchers are going to break. You can limit their pitches and limit their innings, and they're still going to blow out. Pitching is hard on the arm.
Young pitchers don't throw enough in the minor leagues, and when they get to the majors, they don't have the stamina; their arms haven't been built up.
When I played, I never needed the spotlight, nor did I want it. I simply wanted to play baseball and be respected by my teammates and the opposing players.
I view my pitching on how confident I was out there, period. And if I lose that confidence, I can become a prisoner of my own mind.
