When you're in the day-to-day grind, it just seems like it's another step along the way. But I find joy in the actual process, the journey, the work. It's not the end. It's not the end event.
You don't project yourself in the Hall of Fame as a player. It's only during that five-year period where people start asking about it, and it doesn't seem real until it happens.
When you're an athlete and you play every day and are conditioning yourself every year, the aging is gradual.
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.
Even though my dad was a manager in the minor leagues, I still traveled around with him and saw it from the field out. Now, as an owner, you're kind of looking from the whole baseball activity from outside in, from a fan's perspective.
I have goals and ambitions, and I see myself as a lifelong baseball student. I have certain philosophies that I'd like to test at some point at the big league level. The job of manager appeals to me, a coach appeals to me, at a different time frame.
I had aches and pains when I played. No player is ever 100 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent. Guys that play 158 or 162 or 145, we are all in the same boat.
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.
When things happen to you in the worst way, you live with it, you go over it, you think, 'What else could I have done?'
My approach to every game was to try to erase the games that were before and try to focus on the game at hand.
I love baseball. The game allowed me the influence to impact kids in a positive way. This gives me a chance to talk to some social issues.
I always thought being a gamer and someone who had a sense of responsibility to the game and to my teammates was the honorable thing.