Top 199 Bat Quotes

I’ve never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say I love you too soon because it means so much. It means you’re not seeing an end to things.

You can’t blame someone for not knowing what his or her job should be if you don’t ask for it right off the bat.

Yes, I was in that game where George Brett hit that home run. Billy saw there was too much pine tar on the bat and he went to the umpire, the next thing we knew they were fighting about it.

One night I went over to get some dope from some Hollywood tough guy. After I left, my son Scott, who was only fifteen, went over with a baseball bat to kill him. I was laughing out of one eye and crying out of the other. I thought, Who am I kidding?

As a kid, I liked making up stories, and I wrote a story about a kangaroo and a bat with Christy Chang, and she went on to become a surgeon.

My voice is very distinct. People hear Tracy Morgan’s voice, and they know Tracy Morgan right off the bat because I’ve been in their homes for so many years.

When I was growing up, we would play a 10-over or 15-over game, and the asking-rate would always be high, and I would end up scoring 30 or 40 runs in 15 balls, so I built that mindset right from the beginning and still continue to bat in the same manner.

It depends upon the make-up of the team where I’m going to bat.

I am a great admirer of Yuvraj and Kaif. They have generally been able to pick up the scoring when they come to bat at numbers six and seven. They also are livewires in the field.

What can I do, I asked myself, that is so spectacular that no one will be able to say he had seen it before? The answer was perfectly obvious. I would send a midget up to bat.

When I rehearse, it ends up doing more harm than good. I think I work a little bit better when it’s right off the bat. Mostly, I try to wrap my head around a role as much as I can without rehearsing and then kind of make it as fresh as possible on the day.

I’ve worn a chainmail suit to swim with sharks, glided over Cirencester with a James Bond-style paramotor strapped to my back, eaten hippo steaks and had a bat dive down my bra. And all the while, I had to face the camera and smile.

Quite honestly, cricket is same at all levels. It’s a game of bat and ball.

I used to be a pretty good hit-and-run man when I played in the minors. I handled the bat well and could hit the ball to the right side of the infield. Nevertheless, I know that you often give the opposition an out on the hit-and-run play.

I wanted to bat for the England cricket team. I was quite good at cricket. But then I kept getting out for low scores. It turned out I didn’t have the talent.

Of course I like to watch myself bat. After every innings, match, series, I do watch my own videos whenever I get the time.

I think that when you’ve got a world in which it’s plausible to have a guy dressed as a giant bat and fight evil clowns and other nightmarish freaks, I think the world has to be visually a little more arresting than a regular world.

In Ranji cricket, I am used heavily as a bowler, but in international cricket I hardly get four overs, and sometimes I never even get to bowl and bat at number eight.

I look at some of the best players around the world and sometimes I do try and bat like them.

If they’re going to take away a portion of maintaining the ball, there needs to be that even contest between bat and ball, otherwise people are going to stop watching and kids aren’t going to want to be bowlers.

For me, fielding is everything – it is a passion that comes from within. You can get a bad ball while you bat, and your bowling may not always be up there, but you are completely in control of how well you field.

You’ve got a little round ball and a little round bat and anything can happen.

I think the oldest comic I got when I was a kid was an issue of ‘World’s Finest’ – it had a Neal Adams cover with Batman where he had turned into a bat, and he was attacking Superman.

I like to weed out the people who aren’t going to enjoy me straight off the bat. If you look at all my specials, I do start more extreme and then, as I get into it, sort of at the three-quarter mark, I normally have a bit of pathos. Is pathos the right word?

No matter where I bat I try to adapt to the situation.

When Mahela Jayawardene was with us before the Test series against Pakistan he said it should all be about enjoying your talent and skill. He took his bat out there to score runs and enjoy playing the game.

Maybe because I bat aggressively and go for big hits at times, people tend to remember my batting. But I have always done well as a stumper, too.

We hate it when movies, right off the bat, tell you who this character is, where they’re from, why they are the way they are. Even ‘Vertigo,’ one of the greatest movies ever made, starts off by explaining why Jimmy Stewart has this fear of heights.

The American boy starts swinging the bat about as soon as he can lift one.

I don’t need to practice my swing. I grew up with a bat in my hands.

I bat righty.

Sometimes you fail with the bat, and then you have to do well with the ball. When you fail with the ball, you have to do well with your willow.

There is no ‘Bat Out of Hell III.’ That should have never happened. To me, that record is nonexistent. It doesn’t exist.

It’s a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square.

I was always dressing up as a kid. I had a dress for all the Los Angeles bar and bat mitzvahs that I was going to when I was 13 which I was crazy for. It was green, dark, shimmery. Very 1980s. It was slightly off-the-shoulder, which I thought was very sophisticated.

You surprise yourself on some balls off the bat. You don’t think you have a chance to catch it. And then your natural ability just takes over.

I played my first game of adult cricket at about eight or nine when the fifth team were short and picked me to field and bat at No 11. From then I just got the bug and wanted to play as often as possible.

I’m a businessman. I bring my bat and glove and attache case to the office and go to work. I don’t give a damn if the other workers at the office like me or not.

I became the master of playing the straight bat – I would go to bars with the boys, I would always be the one to start a fight, to be outrageous and drink the most. I even went to the extreme of marrying the perfect woman for me.

That contest between bat and ball, we don’t want to lose that or get further away from that even contest.

I grew up in the ’60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

If you underperform for your owners, eventually they pick up their bat and ball and go home.

Movies don’t sit in the theaters for an entire summer like they did in 1982. Now you’ve got a two- or three-week shelf life so you need to have that awareness right off the bat. And in order to make a lot of people know about your movie, you need to be out there banging the drum and showing your stuff.

There are plenty of things you can do to help animals! The best advice that I can give right off the bat is not to get overwhelmed and feel bad when you read about all the issues.

I went through a little hippy dippy program at Brandeis and was bat mizvahed by the rabbi who married my parents. We celebrated the High Holidays and had the traditional Rosh Hashanah dinner.

For a batsman, the bat is your main weapon and you need to respect it. The more you respect it, the better it helps with your cricket.

You don’t know what it feels like to have someone go to bat for you until you really need it, and they do.

Cadillacs are down at the end of the bat.

I have to be prepared always and be at my best. I looked to bat 50 overs and score as many possible. It may not happen all the time, but whenever I see the opportunity, I try to make the most of it.

I always believed that all it would take was a decent role. I felt like a pinch hitter with a leaden bat: that if I got a chance, I could hit a home run.

We’re all players and musicians and we sure all get along good. We just clicked right off the bat. We started playing and then we almost immediately started recording.

To make big runs you’ve got to bat plenty of time.

I don’t think anyone would bat an eye if I wrote a song.

When I’m at the plate, I’m not thinking about what I’m trying to do with the bat – I’m thinking about what the pitcher is trying to do with the ball.

I know what makes me good, and it’s not a bat.

Your bat’s not always going to be there.

One of the most fundamental questions people have about defense attorneys is, ‘How can you do that? How can you go to bat everyday for a person that you may not know is guilty but you have a pretty good idea that he’s not so innocent?’ It’s a question that defense attorneys answer for themselves by not addressing.

To be honest, you go to a bat mitzvah in Los Angeles, and you can count on at least a few industry people to be there.

A gun is no more dangerous than a cricket bat in the hands of a madman.

I could always hit. I learned to hit with a broomstick and a ball of tape and I could always get that bat on the ball.

I take great pride in my defense because the bat is not always going to be there.

I think the higher you can bat in your Shield team, if you’re doing well there the better off you’re going to be for batting anywhere in the Test line-up or any of the line-ups.

In street ball, you really don’t care about playing defense, unless it’s some kind of flashy steal or a big block where you bat the ball across the court, but all you’re really worried about is scoring.

After getting dropped from the Australian team, for me it was always just about being the team, it doesn’t matter where I bat.

We are starting off with our own different characters and our own laws and everything, looking at Bruce Wayne and how he came to be the person that he was and how he comes to be this man that jumps around in the Bat suit.

That was the bat signal for me – ‘Rent’ changed my life. It took me years before I got beyond that show.

I’m not afraid to swing the bat. If they elect to pitch to me, I’m going to swing. I’m not as picky as Mr. Sheffield. I’ll swing at something over my head.

For my striking, I’ve learned to adapt it right off the bat for MMA. Even my jiu-jitsu, I adapt it very much for MMA.

People always ask me how I can hit the ball so far, and I say, ‘I just swing.’ It’s the coaches who first told me I had good bat speed. I was just swinging, and I guess it was fast. I’m pretty fast at everything.

The more allrounders you have, the more difficult it becomes for the opposition. The reason being, if you have players who can bat and bowl, and if they are proper allrounders – they may be spinning or fast-bowling allrounders – they add to the strength of the team.

It’s important to get well-rounded right off the bat. A lot of experienced dancers can get pigeonholed into one thing. I’ve been hired for a lot of different gigs simply because I can do a lot of different things with different levels of dancers. And it’s sad to me that some dancers don’t do more.

You have to stay fresh and blank in your mind when you go out to bat. You complicate things, and you’re gone.

How do you combat a man with a firearm? You don’t combat him with a golf club, baseball bat or a knife. You combat him with another firearm.

I sort of know my role with the ball but with the bat I’ve been up and down the order quite a few times.

One thing I can say right off the bat is that creating great editorial is a huge challenge, and you can’t help but go through the process and not appreciate how valuable this skill is, and how much I admire the people who do this every day.

For India, it is all about whatever number they want me to bat and not the other way round.

My batting practice would be a guy throwing balls in the way in which I liked it. It was all about getting ball on bat, rather than something whizzing past your ear.

I’ve always said when I broke in I was an average player. I had an average arm, average speed and definitely an average bat. I am still average in all of those.

Used to be bats had thick handles and a big barrel. Then they found it’s not the size of the bat that gets home runs – it’s the speed with which you can swing it.

A full mind is an empty bat.

I’m blind as a bat.

I can’t bring a sword into the ground, so have to make do with the bat.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

As a captain, you sit on the sidelines and it’s evident the best place to bat is up front.

I got scars on my face that tell some kind of story. I’m looking in the mirror, and I got one scar that’s really two scars – half from a baseball bat and half from playing football in college. I’ll tell you, though, after a while, your face gets so wrinkled up you can hardly see them.

I try to keep the ball up to the bat, and I usually get the ball to outswing, so I get wickets like that.

We found that just by the way we stood, affected women dramatically, and if you look at our show, you’ll see that we always stood with our legs open our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women!

There are certain things I can’t do, certain pitches I can’t hit. You stay away from them. You try to wait for pitches you can hit. The bat speed isn’t what it used to be. You make up for it by using your head, working counts, getting ahead in counts and getting pitches to hit and hitting them hard.

If you’ve learned anything from the modern superhero myth, if you see a bat around and it bites you, you have a 75 percent chance of ending up a superhero. Otherwise, you’ll probably get really sick. But it’d be cool to be a superhero. You don’t need to be too afraid.

It’s always good to bat at the top, where you get more opportunities, but sometimes crucial 30s and 40s can be very helpful for the team. Ultimately it is a team sport. Personal records don’t matter much if your team ends up on the losing side.

I say all the time that when you first meet me, you know three things right off the bat: I’m Nigerian, I love to laugh, and I love Jesus.

I learned to bat and bowl on different pitches and knew when to go hard and when to back off. It was just something I learned.

There have been a few times in my career when I have been close to tears after completing an innings, but rarely when I am waiting to bat.

When the others grew tired and went home and there was no one else to play with I used to play my own Test matches on the porch of our house, using a broom handle or a stick as the bat and a marble as the ball. I would arrange the pot plants to represent fielders and try to find the gaps as I played my shots.

There are very rare occasions when you get a good wicket to bat on, but whatever wicket you get, you have to play at least 20 overs for your side.

To stay sane, I lived in my head, where I could travel and imagine. In my mind, I played a championship game with the Knicks. I won Wimbledon five times. If the Yankees needed a home run, I came to bat.

We all know just bowling won’t do in modern international cricket, and we have to contribute with the bat and as a fielder, too.

The easiest way around the bases is with one swing of the bat.

My first five years on this planet were spent in Sudan and Zambia and after a short stint in London my family finally settled in Sydney. Right off the bat I knew I was different from the other kids.

Growing up in New Jersey, bat mitzvas were all about the elegant parties.

I can bat in the morning, afternoon, evening, night, on ice, desert, wherever and whenever. It is almost nirvana for me. It takes me away from the stresses of life.

The first time I picked up a bat in a professional game, I hit a ball hard left-handed, and my first home run was so effortless, it surprised me.

If you aim for parody right off the bat and it misses, no offense to the filmmakers, but it is Meet the Spartans.

But put it this way: if I have a bad day keeping, I know I can put it right with the bat, and vice versa. When it all comes together, happy days.

Hit a home run – put your head down, drop the bat, run around the bases, because the name on the front is more – a lot more important than the name on the back.

It’s flattering to be compared to Kohli. He is very consistent, and his mindset is very good. He gives his 100 per cent every time he walks out to bat.

To cure a batting slump, I took my bat to bed with me. I wanted to know my bat a little better.

Baseball just a came as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. A sport, a business and sometimes almost even a religion.

I was a heathen Jewess with no bat mitzvah. Only the neurosis, the brown hair, and the self-deprecating humor. But being one of the only Jewish kids in my WASPy hometown definitely informed my perspective on the humor of being an outsider.

I had great control, I never missed hitting the other’s fellow bat.

I wasn’t bat mitzvahed.

Cam Newton, his best throw is better than anybody’s best throw. I’m gonna say that right off the bat. But I will take consistency over volatile play any day of the week.

As an international batsman, I have to come out to bat under any situation. Sometimes a platform has been laid; on others, we have to build one. That’s part of our job, and that’s why international cricket is so challenging.

Decide while you’re young to keep the commandments of God, and you won’t have to think fast, because before temptation even steps up to the bat, you’ll have made your decision. You were smart enough to think first.

Fans love McGwire for his powerful physique, for his on-field hugs of his son, the part-time bat boy. He is Big Mac, or Paul Bunyan in Cardinals red with a white-ash bat instead of an ax.

When I wasn’t working on Broadway, I worked in a Bat Mitzvah dress shop and was the Cinderella of the shop – always cleaning and vacuuming!

I like wearing good clothes. Some of my friends who are into making clothes told me since I was already playing with my own brand of bat sticker, I should make a foray in fashion. The idea has worked very well.

I’ve got a right to knock down anybody holding a bat.

My main strength is my bowling, but where I bat, I can also contribute for the team, and that is important.

I’m from a small town so, like, everyone’s married with children or about to have children. So it’s a little hard when you go home and people are like – and that’s why people think I’m gay – because they’re like ‘Why aren’t you married?’ And I’m like, ‘it doesn’t happen for everyone right off the bat.’

My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it’s a diverse Latinx writers room – we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It’s diverse within its Latinidad.

Probably spending 12 years at boarding school – comedy became a survival gene. But I think some people are funny right off the bat, as soon as they can speak or be naughty.

I said jokingly that if you bat like a king, you should also get out like a king; you should not be dismissed like a soldier. If you have made runs aggressively, then you will get out that way, too. That’s how it is.

I’ve always said I don’t mind where I bat and I have exactly the same mindset when I’m batting seven as I would at five.

You need more individuals who can do more than one job in the field. Especially if all of them are good fielders and if they can contribute with bat and ball if needed. Just adds to the strength of the side.

The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

It has been a great honour to play for the West Indies, to hold a bat and to spend 17 years in international cricket. That is something I am proud of.

What you have to understand is that the first day I picked up a bat I made an impression on my older sister Agnes and my dad. It was about seeing people satisfied by what you’re doing. I was creating a fan base.

Babe Ruth made a baseball fan of me. I used to go to Yankee Stadium just to see him come to bat.

A lot of folks would say that if I had been a little more selfish with my bat, I would have had a much bigger average. But that doesn’t worry me.

We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game, and we liked to play it.

A captain has to be able to look a player in the eye before he starts his run-up or goes out to bat.

There’s a lot of things I would definitely go to bat for in Hawaii. I’ve been all over that stuff. If someone told me to be quiet about that because of my profession, no. That’s my people.

I was much entertained last summer with a tame bat, which would take flies out of a person’s hand.

The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

It’s very important in international cricket to be able to hold a bat, not just hold up an end, but have the ability to score runs.

And they didn’t have to get into a lot of legal speak or talk ER terms, they were real people. I think that’s why so many actresses were attracted to it. And it was just about problems that you could identify with so much, right off the bat.

When you’ve played this game for ten years and gone to bat seven-thousand times and gotten two-thousand hits do you know what that really means? It means you’ve gone zero for five-thousand.

I think I should be able to contribute either with the bat, ball or with my fielding. I am comfortable doing everything.

I’ve done it before where I get guys banging their bat on the ground after their second or third at-bat because you just have so many different combinations to try to get him to swing and miss.

As Major League Baseball struggles to overcome its staid image and lure younger fans – according to Nielsen, most of the sport’s TV viewers are over 50 – the simple bat flip has come to symbolize the culture war being waged within its ranks.

Once you play County cricket, you get strong in the mind and get used to different methods… If it’s swinging or seaming in overcast conditions, it’s all about how positive you are mentally and if your body movement is in the right direction… You can then always bat better.

All it really takes to fall in love with a script is to understand, right off the bat, one piece of the story.

Obviously, I did not start my Test career too well. With the bat, I was probably not quite ready to play at that stage. I was happy to go back to first-class system and learn my game a bit more, honing my skills, particularly my defence and patience.

I grew up on the softball field. Every day I would take my glove and my bat with me.

I don’t think that I’ve scored these many runs or I’ve achieved these things, because I believe it is something that doesn’t help me. Whenever I go out to bat, it’s a fresh start.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can’t think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

The battle between bat and ball is a one-on-one thing. I love that stuff, but you play it in a team.

Clearly you need a new team to go out to bat on your behalf; to fight for your rights and to report back to you personally and to the leadership of the IFP.

My dad used to do it when we were little, and I tried it when we played around in the back yard. Eventually, I got a bat and a real ball and played around to see if I could hit left-handed.

The taps with the bat on the spikes are one for my grandmother, one for my grandfather, one for my little sister. Then the one on the helmet is showing faith in God that I can do it.

I am an arm hitter. When you snap the bat with your wrists just as you meet the ball, you give the bat tremendous speed for a few inches of its course. The speed with which the bat meets the ball is the thing that counts.

When you are playing the longer version, there are times when you don’t have to get bat on ball on a regular basis but maybe a good leave outside the off stump can play its part in you surviving and the time that you would like to spend on the crease.

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.

I want to be an asset to the team who can bat or bowl in any position.

In terms of how I want to influence the game, I try to have a positive effect with the ball or bat in my hand.

You need to be flexible but I feel I can bat at any position depending on the condition.

We have to understand that the five-day format has its own uncertainties, unlike ODIs or T20s. In ODIs, you know that you have to field for 50 overs only, while in Test cricket, there may be a situation that a team might bat for one-and-a-half to two days.

It’s a pretty sure thing that the player’s bat is what speaks loudest when it’s contract time, but there are moments when the glove has the last word.

I don’t like to sound egotistical, but every time I stepped up to the plate with a bat in my hands, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the pitcher.

If you’re going to write an anthem for an old man who’s up at political bat for the last time, give him a decent song. Send him off with something that creates some chills or something.

A lot of hitters stay away from the plate, some are close up, some are forward, some are back. The thing about hitting is this: You have to know the strike zone. That’s the most important thing. Hit strikes and put the bat on the ball.

I’m not ever going to be a big bat flip guy. I don’t really care. But the guy on the mound might care, so that’s a risk.

I don’t like to sound immodest, but I believe in what I can do. Sometimes it’s been frustrating because I haven’t gotten to bat; if you’re on the bench, and an unimaginative person doesn’t see you as right for a certain role, you don’t get the chance to hit the home run.

I’ve always been one to want a fair contest between bat and ball even as a batter, so if that’s taken away I don’t think that’s great.

I try to keep it real simple. I try not to add a lot of frosting on what I’m doing. Just take the swing and don’t muscle the swing, because if you get in the hitting position and you take the swing, I generate a lot more bat speed, and that works for me.

That’s why you train every single day. You want to just bat.

I don’t understand the whole dating thing. I know right off the bat if I’m interested in someone, and I don’t want them to waste their money on me and take me out to eat if I know I’m not interested in that person.

I go to bat with people that are loyal to me.

I just try to make contact with the ball. It’s obvious that I like to swing the bat. I’m not thinking of taking a lot of pitches.

When I was 12, I was taking batting practice with an aluminum bat at Tiger Stadium. I don’t know where it landed exactly, but upper deck somewhere. Yeah, people were surprised.

From a purely selfish, batting point of view, I couldn’t bat any better than the 2010-11 Ashes and then in India in 2012. That was as good as I could play.

If I can bat against someone who is bowling 145 kph on a challenging wicket – that confidence is really important.

Usually when you get on the sweet spot of the bat, you don’t really feel it.

A large part of my childhood was spent holding a cricket bat. The first time I picked one up was in the garden aged about six, and I’ve never really put the bat down since.

I like to think of the world’s greatest athlete coming up to bat against me – Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don’t care who it is – and I’m looking at him thinking, you have no chance.

I faced odds when glaucoma took the bat out of my hands. But I didn’t give in or feel sorry for myself. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: ‘It may be cloudy in my right eye, but the sun is shining very brightly in my left eye.’

As a member of the Senate Aging Committee, I’ve gone to bat for seniors by cracking down on senior fraud, combating price gouging by pharmaceutical companies, and pushing for wealthy individuals to contribute their fair share to Social Security.

In high school, I taught dance classes for 3-year-olds up to 16-year-olds, so between that and some bat mitzvah money, I saved up a pretty good nest egg to move to L.A.

I played softball and basketball growing up. I really wanted to play football but both parents said no. I was mad for a second, then got over it. Now, just because I’m tall doesn’t mean I can play basketball. I was waaaaay better at swinging a bat.

It’s a big part of me still, as is being athletic – although these days I find myself playing tennis, hiking, and doing yoga and Pilates rather than swinging a bat.

You know I could get hit with a baseball bat and it don’t mean nothing.

When I first signed to RCA, I was sort of excited and shocked that it was happening. But over the next couple of years, it really started to feel like that game you play when you’re a little kid – the one where you put your nose on a bat and then spin around and try to walk.

My microphone skills were developed at a young age watching my dad on the microphone. My dad DJ’ed bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, things of that nature.

I was fortunate in college to play as a freshman, but in the NBA, not a lot of rookies are coming in and making a significant impact right off the bat.

The pitcher has got only a ball. I’ve got a bat. So the percentage in weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.

I’ve heard there are troubles of more than one kind; some come from ahead, and some come from behind. But I’ve brought a big bat. I’m all ready, you see; now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

There is nothing as fun as making a cultural splash with a movie. Sometimes the splash happens, like with ‘Swingers,’ where it sort of slowly ripples out, yet everybody could quote it. Or it could be something like ‘Elf,’ where you just make a big splash right off the bat when the movie comes out.

The adrenaline is very important for me when I go in to bat. That makes me tick, makes me think better. When your energy is up and running, you have a much better chance of doing well.

The Olympics are great for notoriety right off the bat, but your body of work is what people remember you for.

I try to hit the ball along the ground, especially against fast bowlers. I also like the bat to come down in the right position and check if my body position is correct. If I’m really watching the ball carefully, then automatically I’m in a good position to hit it down the ground.

I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That’s when you’ve got to be serious. When I get out on the field, nothing’s a joke to me. I don’t feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.

This game’s a lot easier early on in your career because people haven’t seen you play. Things got a lot harder when people saw what I did with the ball and began to think about how to bat against me.

If Trescothick had tried to get me off the field when batting well, I’d have hit him with my bat.

Whenever I go out to bat, my only responsibility is to look at the scoreboard and think what India needs from me at this moment.

I had a bat mitzvah, was confirmed, went to Jewish summer camp, I go to temple for the High Holy Days. I think, like most people in their early 20s, I kind of strayed away from it. I think once I have a family I’ll be back into it.

When I look at someone like Andrew Symonds, I see a player who has done phenomenally well with the bat, as his record shows. He certainly has the ability to be a very good all-rounder, but I think to be a great one, you need to be able to turn a game with the bat or the ball.

I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?