I've had teammates I didn't get along with, who hasn't? I've never had a teammate call me a bad guy, while he was my teammate, and if he did when I was gone what kind of teammate was he anyway?
I wanted to create a multibillion dollar company that lets me go out and let us go out and change the world and create a Skin Cancer Awareness Center that costs a quarter a billion dollars.
Short of baseball and my family, it was gaming. And gaming is a $20-million to $200-million multi-year effort. It's an insane, stupid and utterly irresponsible act. But I did it.
So every dollar of income that I have that is potentially taxed away is a dollar I can't put in my company to create a job. My entire company is around job creation.
I wanted to create jobs and create something that had a very longstanding world-changing effect. We were close. We were close to getting there. It just fell apart.
Every dollar I can't commit to my company that's paid in taxes is paying a government that I believe is too big and doing way too much that I don't want done.
I played on teams with 24 guys pulling the rope one way and one guy pulling the other. I've seen how destructive it can be. I tell them, 'If 13 of you are insanely successful and one fails, we all lose.'
I had the perfect job for a gamer. From February to October, I'd get up at 7 in the morning with nothing to do but play games until I had to be at the park around 1 or 2 o'clock. When I got back after the game, I played until 3 or 4 in the morning.
I took a shot and tried to create something world changing and it didn't work out. I gave it everything I had, literally, and now I'm just trying to manage day by day and it's been challenging but my wife and my kids are healthy, and I'm OK.
One of the walls of my bedroom was a collage of about 15 years of baseball photos. I would cut out the baseball pictures from every issue and I had this huge montage of thousands of pictures.
The God-given ability that you're given to use, it speaks as much about who and what I was and was around, and the crowd of people that I chose to live my life with, as it does about me.
When you're having a bad day at work, a lot of times it's your head. When you're having good days, a lot of times it's the absence of the mind.
I don't hide my feelings, but when it comes to illness, I guess I don't panic. My father was the same way. I'm the provider for the family and the caretaker. If I panic, who is anybody going to run to?