“I could learn how to press ‘Record’ on a tape recorder and write for a newspaper or a magazine.”

Every pitcher can beat you, it doesn’t matter how good you are.

I don’t know if steroids are going to help you in baseball. I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe steroids can help eye-hand coordination and technically hit a baseball.

My career is an open book, but my life is not.

I don’t know if the record is going to happen. I don’t really think about the record. There are other things I worry about.

Serra High school, to me, was my most enjoyable time for me in my entire life. That was the only time I was free. We just played baseball because it was fun.

There is nothing better than walking out and hitting a home run.

Sometimes I surprise my own damn self.

I have a chef who makes sure that I’m getting the right amounts of carbs, proteins and fats throughout the day to keep me at my max performance level.

I think everyone needs to be a role model, period.

If you want to be on top, you’ve got to have broad shoulders, because as fast as you get there, the faster they try to knock you down.

I think some of the pressure comes from the expectations of other people. Like if your father played baseball, they expect you to be the big lifesaver or something when you play a sport.

I’d like to help educate kids about the Major Leagues – what to anticipate, what to expect, what they’ll need to do to prepare themselves.

I like to be against the odds.

I never stop looking for things to try and make myself better.

Those boos really motivate me to make something happen.

Baseball is just my job.

My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.

Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.

You gotta’ sell a million records before you talk about getting paid at a major [label].

I took that opinion to the wall, often in public, often had to… I often had to fight in public with the very same people who I was trying to convince to play my records!

We are the outcasts, we are the ones that are different, we are the ones that never got along with anyone else, we are the ones that went back to our rooms and put on our headphones and listened to those records that made us happy

We started with Denny Cordell, and he was a great record producer. He knew exactly how to take a band that knew absolutely nothing, and guide you without trying to tell you what to do.

In many ways, I’ve chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don’t like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.