Never let your dreams go away.

I long for the days when athletes were revered. I want to see the romance return to sports, to see people enjoy the game purely for the game and the players.

Yes, hard is good. When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time on my knees playing with balls. I guess it was only natural that I became a catcher.

You can't get real happy or real depressed when you play baseball. Baseball is a great sport in that it offers a player a lot of opportunities for atonement.

One thing anyone can go through is a slump. Unless you're Greg Maddux, it's going to happen to everybody.

It's easy for me not to go to Mass on the road. But I've made a fundamental decision. I'm going to be dedicated. I'm going to make the time. I'm going to get up, if that means getting up at seven on a Sunday morning before a day game and do it, I'm going to do it.

When you're 25, you can eat hamburgers and pizza and drink beer and stay out all night and come out the next day and drink a couple cups of coffee and just play. If I did that today, my heart would stop and I'd need a stretcher and an IV.