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 could never get a real good clear picture of what I could become.

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.

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 had a lot of fear that would motivate me to try to work hard, because I didn't know what I would do if I wasn't a baseball player.

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.

It's a pitch you can extend your career with because it's less taxing on your body. It's like dog years, but in reverse. I feel like I'm 27 or 26 in knuckleball years!