I've felt some great feelings on the baseball field... in front of 50,000 people and millions on TV... but the feeling you get when you give a kid a chance, that is a hundred times greater than that feeling.

All I really try and do is live up to my potential and do as well as I possibly could and to bring to the ballpark each and every day a good effort and do the best that I could each and every day.

Sometimes I think sportsmanship is a little bit forgotten in place of the individual attention.

I think the cloud of suspicion has been hanging over baseball for a while. I think there has been some positive things that have come out of that. There has been a drug test policy that was been implemented that got the blessings of both the Players Association and MLB. They are trying to maintain the integrity of this sport and trying to get it back, but that cloud I think will hang over a little longer.

We consider ourselves the luckiest fans on the face of the Earth.

A lot of people think I had such a rosy career, but I wanted to identify that one of the things that helps you have a long career is learning how to deal with adversity, how to get past it. Once I learned how to get through that, others things didn't seem so hard.

Stubbornness usually is considered a negative; but I think that trait has been a positive for me.