I grew up playing football and baseball and moved on to play college baseball, and, you know, as a kid, my dream was to play professional baseball.
In baseball, you have to remain calm, cool, and collected. In football, you can let out a little anger sometimes. It was a fun game, and I liked it, but I knew in my heart I was going to play baseball.
Baseball people think they can find athletes with good bodies and teach them to play baseball. What's wrong with giving someone who already knows how to play baseball a chance? I think I fall into that category.
Sports like baseball or baseball are easy to dramatise, because all of them have a pause and that helps with the tension. Football never stops. I'm a football fan. I believe in the beauty of the game.
I was a fan of baseball growing up. We played baseball; I used to play in an A&P parking lot. It wasn't always easy to find a good baseball field to play in.
I grew up in East St. Louis so I wanted to play baseball as a kid. Then I moved to Nebraska and became a football fan and wanted to play football. But I've always been fighting. Growing up in East St. Louis was hard. You had to fight there.
I got into baseball, and everyone just started calling me a geek, like, 'There's the nerd from Harvard.' Then it took 20 years of working in baseball and me actually leaving and going to football for people to say, 'He's the baseball guy.' So maybe at some point I'll be known as a football guy too.
By the time I got to high school, I didn't play anything but baseball because I was on a mission. I really wanted to get a scholarship. I really wanted to focus all my time and efforts on baseball. When I got up to Florida State, God spoke to me very clearly and called me out of that and called me into music, which up until that point had just been a hobby.
I loved playing baseball, and the only reason I played was to play professional baseball. I wanted that to be my career for a long time. I turned down multiple jobs and meetings because of it.
I'm glad that I just played baseball, because I'm sure I had a much longer baseball career than I would've had a football career. I did miss football, but I didn't miss some of the injuries from football.
Having a father as a football and a baseball coach, I grew up around college baseball players, college football players, like, I just knew sports my whole life.
It wasn't really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don't know what happened; baseball just got boring to me, I guess.
We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game, and we liked to play it.
I am convinced that God wanted me to be a baseball player. I was born to play baseball.
I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
My baseball career ended in college.I played on the freshman team, but was becoming more drawn to intellectualism than athleticism, and so I gave up baseball, and it was perfect timing because baseball was going to give up me very soon.