In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work.
When you win the Cy Young, it's like, well, you're a baseball player, that's what you're supposed to do. When you win the Clemente Award, you don't do it to get recognized for your work, but it means so much more than baseball.
It's the same game. It's baseball. National League, American League. It's baseball. I just come here and try to do my thing. Do my work and help the team to win.
It's sort of like baseball - the more you know about baseball, the more you get into a baseball game. NASCAR is the same way.
If you can't enjoy the game unless you are pretty sure your team is going to win, baseball is not the game for you. Remember, the best team in baseball in any year is going to be beaten about 60 times.
If everyone's on the same page, doesn't matter what race, what background, what religion you are, if everyone comes together like a good, solid football team, baseball team... that's how you win games. It's easy.
Sure, it's nice to win. But there's only one thing that's important to me and that's the money we're going to get, win or lose. . . . I don't love baseball, I like it. And to me, baseball means money, and that's all I care about.
Life is like the baseball season, where even the best team loses at least a third of its games, and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough, in the end you may find you have won it all.
The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
Praise the name of baseball. The word will set captives free. The word will open the eyes of the blind. The word will raise the dead. Have you the word of baseball living inside you? Has the word of baseball become part of you? Do you live it, play it, digest it, forever? Let an old man tell you to make the word of baseball your life. Walk into the world and speak of baseball. Let the word flow through you like water, so that it may quicken the thirst of your fellow man.
Baseball would be a quite remarkable activity if it was the one place in the world where your co-workers didn't have any impact on how productive you were. But in fact, baseball is a high-stress occupation, and those sort of stress-inducing activities... just have a huge impact on how the team functions, I think.
In baseball, when you get into the batter's box, that's it. It's just you. It's one man against the world. All that matters in that moment is your individual achievement and your individual skill. There is literally nothing that anyone else on your team can do for you. Hell, they're all sitting on the bench, waiting to see what happens, just like the fans in the crowd! It's just you and your bat. And the ball.
The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.
People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.
Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
A baseball team is like a band. Because, conceptually, there are no heroes in baseball - there's just the team.
Baseball is a set of individuals doing their thing in the same team, but it's much more individual. In basketball people are making real time decisions about who gets the ball, do we trust everybody out on the court, and the analytics certainly don't show you all those subtle dynamics, but they're very important.
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
It's always an honor to work with the Twins Community Fund and be a part of all the good that they do. They help people in so many ways. To be part of not only a baseball team, but being a part of something where you're helping people who need help, that's what life is all about really.