“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?”
“I don’t vote party lines. Never have. I vote for the best candidate.”
“I was raised to understand and know the difference between right and wrong.”
“I’ve been playing games for 30 years, and I’ve been a hard-core gamer.”
“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.”
“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.”
“One thing I was told early in my career is when you walk out on the field, the name on the back of your jersey is not yours – it’s your dad’s. I’ve carried that with me forever as something – I’ve worked harder and learned more about my father since he passed than when he was alive, because when he was alive, I was young, and I knew everything.”
“Only a geek would say this, but my first true love was a game called ‘Wizardry’; that was the game that hooked me forever.”
“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 was always an MMO fan. I’m playing ‘World of Warcraft’ in the clubhouse, and J.D. Drew and Coco Crisp saw me playing. They came over and got interested, and they wound up creating accounts.”
“Before I pitch any game, from spring training to Game 7 of the World Series, I’m scared to death.”
“I care what people think, but that doesn’t change what I say. I am who I am.”
“I don’t pitch for contracts.”
“The things I was allowed to experience, the people I was able to call friends, teammates, mentors, coaches and opponents, the travel, all of it, are far more than anything I ever thought possible in my lifetime.”
“The game was here long before I was, and will be here long after I’m gone.”
“The only thing I hope I did was never put in question my love for the game, or my passion to be counted on when it mattered most.”
“I did everything I could to win every time I was handed the ball.”
“Have I said dumb things? Absolutely, who hasn’t? But I have never backed away from being called out on something I did or said wrong.”
“I’ve made mistakes, I’ve misspoke, I am sure I will again sometime, but that happens, that’s part of being human in my book. I’m OK with that. I’ve never done it maliciously, ever.”
“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 am human, when people write bad stuff about me it bothers me, but I know that will never end.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things. But never, and I mean never, could anyone ever make the mistake of calling me a Yankee fan.”
“I think I’ve earned a certain level of respect, based on my accomplishments and my consistency.”
“I’ve got a wife, four kids, a business, and a baseball career.”
“I’m a good person. I don’t wish hateful things on people. I don’t hate anybody. I know that I treat people right.”
“In my mind, I never doubted whether I was going to achieve what I wanted to do. I just had to decide what it is I wanted to do.”
“In baseball, I was always in control of everything until I let the ball go.”
“Baseball is not a sport you can achieve individually.”
“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.”
“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 don’t have any problem with government helping entrepreneurs and businesses.”
“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 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.”
“I had three jobs my junior and senior year of high school. I worked for the gas station and worked for a pizza place.”
“Trust me, I have never written a speech in my life, and if I have my way, I never will.”
“I am much more of a geek than I am an athlete.”
“You could ask any position player and they’ll tell you: pitchers aren’t athletes.”
“When you say you are a gamer and you are a celebrity or a former celebrity there’s a grain of salt that everybody takes that with.”
“More often than not, what you open, unwrap and install on your hard drive is not what you were told you were getting.”
“As much as I’d like to think I’m a really good designer, I’m average.”
“Most guys who don’t like me are either Democrats or Yankee fans.”
“I’ve got thick skin.”
“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.’”
“In this I-me society, my job is to get people to buy into something bigger than themselves.”
“I’m a very routine-oriented guy.”
“I don’t miss anything I did for a living.”
“I was such a screwup when I got to the big leagues. I was a total idiot.”
“I did all the stupid things you’d expect from a 21-year-old kid with money.”
“I tell people all the time that without the fans, I’ve got nothing.”
“War is by no means something glamorous, and I don’t think that should ever be forgotten.”
“I was a very weird amalgam of things as a kid.”
“I loved fantasy role play.”
“I had a laptop when they weighed 10 pounds.”
“On a two week road trip I know I can get by better with no underwear than no laptop.”
“People love to say we get paid a lot of money to play a game, but it stopped being a game when you start getting paid.”
“The money I saved during baseball was probably all gone. I’m tapped out.”
“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.”
“I’ve always wanted to be the best in the world as a baseball player, so when I started to think about opening a business, it was with that mindset.”
“I’ve been able to do what I love and what I’m passionate about my entire life. I made, you know, an insane amount of money playing baseball.”
“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.”
“I came back after my surgery, throwing four to six miles harder than I did before.”
“It is all about rehab. Most doctors can make you 100 percent well physically. I would tell you that it is 25 percent about the surgery and 75 percent about the rehab.”
“There’s not a long track record of people leaving professional sports to become a software developer.”
“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.”
“I’ve helped create over 400 jobs in the worst economy of my lifetime. That’s cool.”
“My whole life was spent doing things that people didn’t believe were possible, because God blessed me with the ability to throw a baseball.”
“In my 20 years of baseball, I’ve been misquoted three or four times, and for someone who talks as much as I do, that’s incredible.”
“Just hear Senator McCain speak. He may not give you the answer you are looking for, he may not be in agreement with you on a stance or an issue, but the man is honest to a fault.”
“I’m a Republican. I’m a former Red Sox. I have a nasty habit of talking – a lot – about anything anyone asks me and totally unconcerned about giving you my opinion. You will never question where I stand – right or wrong, agree or disagree – on anything.”
“I’m loud. I talk too much; I think I know more than I do – those and a billion other issues I know I have.”
“I used to visit kids with cancer all the time. Now I’m in the club. I understand what’s happening to these little kids with brain cancer, and I ask myself, ‘How do they make it through the day?’ So you see a little 5-year-old and you say, ‘If she can do it, I can suck it up.’”
“I always believed God gave us the tools to take care of ourselves.”
“Some of the most racist things that I’ve ever heard come out of people that are on the air at ESPN. There are some of the biggest racists in sports commentating, and you take it for what it is.”
“The Internet has kind of allowed me to go to a virtual library whenever I want to find out something about something and not use one source but find multiple ways to research certain topics or subjects.”
“I would like to be one of the people responsible for getting Elizabeth Warren out of politics. She’s a nightmare. The Left’s holding her up as the second coming of Hillary Clinton; Lord knows we don’t need the first.”
“If you think about a lifestyle short of retirement that lends itself to being a hardcore gamer, there is none better than being a major league starting pitcher. I work once every five days and travel and am alone all the time. So while the other guys were spending their money on the all the cars and jewelry, I bought laptops.”
“’Reckoning’ will be the first game of its kind. They’ve taken that ‘God of War’-style combat and placed it in a truly open world with hundreds of hours of gameplay. You can do whatever it is you want to do. What path you take, what role you choose, what trail you blaze – there’s meaning and depth and substance in the world.”
“I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
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