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.
