The best compliment you can give a hitter is he's a tough out; that initiates fear in a pitcher.
Ted Williams was the greatest hitter I ever saw, but DiMaggio was the greatest all around player.
The buzzer timing is so important and when you get into a rhythm like that - to go back to baseball you'll hear hitters on a hot streak say that the ball looks like a beach ball -and when you have the timing on the buzzer and you're just getting in whenever you want, that seems to sort of snowball.
It just tickles me still when you see Roger Clemens, as great as he is, throw a split-finger and the hitter just swings and misses. They don't see that ball that well. Jack Morris threw an awful good one and Mike Scott. There's a lot of great pitchers over the years that I think that pitch definitely helped their career.
If I'd been able to put the collection together in one go, say over two years, we'd have had a special team, most wouldn't stay. One or two glory seasons and they were off. To them, the north-east was too far out. They wanted to be with the big hitters.
I was a lousy hitter in May doing the same things that made me a great hitter in June.
I always say that I think my job is behind home plate, call a good game, play some good defense, and also, I know I was not a power hitter.
I don't like to guess. Just react. Some guys are guess hitters. I just could never do it. If you guess and guess wrong, you have no shot of hitting anything else.
Any time first time out, you just want to make sure you can get hitters out again.
All I really try to do is whatever hitter gets in there, I just try to get him out in as few pitches as possible.
