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.'
I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.
Some of these guys wear beards to make them look intimidating, but they don't look so tough when they have to deliver the ball. Their abilities and their attitudes don't back up their beards.
I can't recall too much about pitching, but I do remember that I was anxious to get it over with. I just wanted to get that first game over with and go from there.
My first year in baseball, there were only one or two reporters. My second year, I got to the Triple-A playoffs, there were four or five. When I came up in 1984, I never saw so many people.
I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.
You start chasing a ball and your brain immediately commands your body to 'Run forward, bend, scoop up the ball, peg it to the infield,' then your body says, 'Who me?'
We're just being ourselves and having fun playing baseball. The biggest thing is when people look at our team, they can see that we're having a lot of fun.
Being thrown into the fire and getting the thing turned around in a hurry made it more difficult. Things have been done the hard way. I think you learn better when things are done the hard way.
I am convinced that in my own career I could usually have hit 30 points higher if I had made a specialty of hitting.
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.
Yeah, I play a lot of their games. Going way back to Bulls vs. Lakers to the later Live stuff, I go at it quite a bit. More than anything tough, I play Madden.
Oh, I think, watching Magic, him being one of my... I'm one of his biggest fans, and just trying to emulate what he did, going out on the playground, and also playing with older guys.
I came in the league as not a shooter, not a scorer. My game was to play defense and make my teammates better. The most important stat to me was that left column - winning. Nothing else matters.
I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.
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.
I feel like a pioneer with the split-fingered fastball. I was the first one to really throw it pretty much 100 percent of the time. It was a pitch that I had to have. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't have been in the big leagues.
I always looked up there, because I remember a time when the only things on the walls in Fenway were the Jimmy Fund sign and the retired numbers. Never in a million years did you think you'd ever be up there with those guys.
I certainly feel I'm carrying the flag for Britain. I feel an honour in that but, at the same time, knowing my roots are in Africa, I'd like that to help motivate people from there. Even coming from a third world country, it is possible to get to the...
I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I'd like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.
Everyone has a breaking point, turning point, stress point, the game is permeated with it. The fans don't see it because we make it look so efficient. But internally, for a guy to be successful, you have to be like a clock spring, wound but not loose...
