I believe in the First Amendment. But I also believe we should be mindful of how other people feel.
I used to follow people home. I just like being anonymous so much that I would follow people home because they didn't know who I was, and I could watch them. I know how that sounds. I could not exist but observe.
Watching the Dodgers perform at a really high level is a nice reminder to us as to how high the bar is.
I don't want to be buried in a Red Sox casket.
Whoever your boss is, or your bosses are, they have 20 percent of their job that they just don't like.
Once you thrust yourself out there in the public domain, it's really hard to retreat, to say no or reclaim that certain part of your life as private.
I think people want the Cubs to succeed, and by extension, they want people associated with the Cubs to succeed.
You can't go through life thinking about what could go wrong.
As I sat back and imagined what my transition from the Red Sox might be, I thought it would smell more like champagne than beer, I guess you would say.
Failure is inherent in the game. So if you don't respond well to adversity, you're probably not going to have a long career.
There are certainly times when baseball is much more than bread and circus, times when baseball resonates deeply and meaningfully with many, many people, and times when a game that is built around overcoming failure can teach us all a few important lessons.
Scouting and player development is the key to year-in and year-out success, not the occasional lucky hit. There are no definitive answers in this game, no shortcuts. When you think you've got it all figured out, you can get humbled very quickly.
It stinks to give up a good player. But if you think that way, you'll never make any trades. You have to focus on what you're getting back.
The Cubs - with their passionate fans, dedicated ownership, tradition, and World Series drought - represented the ultimate new challenge and the one team I could imagine working for after such a fulfilling Red Sox experience.
Baseball is a game based on adversity. It's a game that's going to test you repeatedly. It's going to find your weaknesses and vulnerabilities and force you to adjust. That adversity, in the big picture, is a really good thing because it shows you where your weaknesses are. It gives you the opportunity to improve.
There are a lot of ways to make a positive impact on the community without necessarily being a politician.
It's a natural push and pull that exists in any sports organization. When you are in a big market and then you win, and you're up against the Yankees, and ratings are what they are and attendance is what it is, no one wants to go backwards; as a business, you don't want to go backwards.
The Cubs, we built one of best farm systems - I think for a while there, it was the best farm system in baseball. And that was great. It got a lot of attention. But we didn't want the credit for the farm system. What we wanted was to see if we could do the tricky part, which was turn a lauded farm system into a World Series champion.
The Red Sox hadn't won in 86 years when we took over. We didn't run from that challenge - we embraced it.
Failure happens to everyone in this game. It's not something worth harping on. What is worth focusing on is how you respond to that failure.
