A lot of people don't trust the pitch. There's this kind of reputation it has for being untrustworthy and fickle and capricious and everything else, and those are words that big league managers and general managers and organizations aren't too fond of.

I think what motivated me was just hope. Something inside of me, deep down in my guts, always felt like there was something in there.

In an unhealthy way, I found a lot of validity in having always been a very good athlete, a very good baseball player, and I've since grown out of that place into a different perspective and learned how to live differently, thankfully, where baseball is certainly something that's very important to me. It's not who I am, though. It's just what I do.

When you start a game, you don't think to yourself, "well, OK, I'm going throw a one-hitter today." It just becomes an organism, your outing becomes an organism and it grows.

I've worked for everything I've ever got and it's worked out. Even if I was the Cy Young Award winner I still would not want to feel that sense of entitlement. I would still treat every game like it's my very first game and my very last game.

You never go into a season thinking you're going to strike out 200 guys or that you would have the most double-digit strikeout games in the big leagues, or anything like that. You just try to win, and the outing becomes what the outing becomes.

There's been this steady metamorphosis from just surviving to being a craftsman and, ultimately, the hope is to be an artist in what you do.?