I hustle, I run down the line, I do whatever I can to win ball games. Those are the only things we can control as baseball players.
Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it’s called the free market. That’s how most people’s salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.
I think this is a sport where we can really challenge all of ourselves as baseball fans, as baseball players, even the casual viewers. It’s just good to think, What can we do that hasn’t been done?
When I think about athletes, probably my favorite guest of all time among baseball players was Ted Williams.
In Hollywood, for me, it’s all about the movie stars and the singers. Baseball players don’t draw too much attention; we’re low key. I’m good with faces and sometimes bad with names, but I’ll walk up to somebody if I know who they are… show them some love.
It really gets into your system. All baseball players have this internal clock around February when it starts to kick in and the juices start to flow. I think underestimated how much I was going to miss it.
When we went home every winter, they warned us not to lift heavy weights because they didn’t want us to lose flexibility. They wanted us to be baseball players, not only home run hitters.
I hustle, I run down the line, I do whatever I can to win ball games. Those are the only things we can control as baseball players.
The reason I didn’t take the baseball route is because they don’t have rankings for baseball players.
I loved being on the set of ‘Field of Dreams’ because I hung out with the baseball players all day, played cards, flirted with Ray Liotta, and had a ball.
I know that baseball players have certain rituals or habits that they develop, because sometimes it becomes somewhat superstitious if they get on a streak and want to do the same thing over and over again.
People know more about baseball players’ contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children’s lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, ‘Do you want to bring a child into this world?’ That’s pretty dire.
Growing up, I looked up to major league baseball players, and now these young women have amazing, incredible women all across the board, from swimming to gymnastics to softball to basketball. It is incredible how far women have come and women in sports have come.
The more that Japanese players go to the big leagues to play and succeed, the more that will serve to inspire young kids in Japan to want to become baseball players when they grow up.
Baseball players are not specialists; they all have to do it all. That is why I, and many aficionados, dislike the American League’s practice of replacing the pitcher with a designated hitter. This creates two players who do not have to do it all.
Baseball players have such a bad rap of, like, ‘We don’t work out or we’re not strong or this or that.’ Guys work so hard in baseball, it’s incredible. But people don’t know that.
When you have good baseball players, you have a chance to win. And when you don’t, you don’t.
Baseball players practice, runners practice, so how can you practice being funny? You get up onstage. You train as an improviser, playing make-believe, using the vernacular of improvisation, saying ‘yes and’ to other people’s ideas, making statements.
If you’ve ever been around a group of actors, you’ve noticed, no doubt, that they can talk of nothing else under the sun but acting. It’s exactly the same way with baseball players. Your heart must be in your work.
A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.
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