My dad and my mom had to sacrifice so much, and had to teach us and show us the way of going about things, how to be humble, all those things. They helped us stay on track for what we wanted to do.
We're baseball players. We don't need guys telling us, 'Hey, you need to hurry. Hey, you need to do this. Hey, you need to step up.' We are professionals, we can do that without anybody telling us. I'm OK with it, but we need to do it on our own.
If you're a pitcher, and you're pitching and you strike me out and you start celebrating on the mound and showing me off, whenever I get a hit off you, I'm going to go and celebrate, and you shouldn't get mad. If you're a pitcher and strike me out and show me respect and you don't show me up, when I get a homer or a hit, I'm not going to show you up. That's what I believe.
I'm a pretty easygoing guy. I'm not hard to get along with. I never had anybody that I had trouble with. On the other team, sometimes you don't like players because of the way they act, but then you get to know them and then they're very good people. But I never disliked anybody.
We [ me and brother] wanted to win at things like basketball games or baseball games, but off the field we never felt like we had to compete with each other.
I think my mom and dad did a great job with that, because we [with brother] never had any competition in baseball. We always tried to help each other.
When I got to the stadium, one of my biggest things was watching video of hitters.
I liked playing with David Eckstein (former Angels shortstop). I'm not talking about players with top skills, I'm sure there were players with way more skill than him, but there were very few people in the league that had the heart like him.
You have to have a lot of motivation, a lot of heart and be able to work hard. You can never be down on yourself because baseball is a sport that will bring you down [at times].
I was very nervous, excited, and happy to be given the opportunity to even be in the major leagues.
There's a lot of disrespect in the major leagues. I believe that the disrespect in the major leagues is at a high rate and is really bad for the gam
