Blowing Quotations | Page 2

Yeah, it was blowing up. Nonstop. All my friends from back home. Guys I haven't really heard from in a while. But it was great.

When I sat in my office and looked at the line board, ... I kept seeing that gaping hole on the right. Modin, Richards and a blank space. There is not another player in our system, not another player who is out there as a free agent or you could trade for, who would fill that gaping hole. When I say Marty is the heart and soul of this team, that's not hyperbole or blowing smoke up his backside.

I don't know what's going on. I don't know if the wind has blown something in, or if it has stopped blowing something out.

I don't know, maybe it's just a mental thing with them. I would want to hit here. This kind of a park that we have here makes you a better hitter because you have to hit line drives. You can't hit a lot of fly balls. It's a big park, the wind's always blowing in. There are outs here.

I don't care what happened last week, last year, last month, what the overall record between the two teams was going back to 1947 or whenever they started playing each other, or who wins when the wind is blowing in from the north. I pay attention to what the matchups are for each individual game.

Natalie did a great job calling the game for me, and I'm just glad it all worked out with the wind blowing the way it was. My screwball was working real well and has been recently. I've been getting everyone to pop the ball up and it continued in this game.

One of the most important things you can do in your life is to learn to pull back the curtain of fear so you can see it for what it really is - the enemy blowing a lot of smoke and pushing your buttons.

There was no way to focus on the movement of the cable. If I looked down at the cable there was water moving everywhere. And if I looked up there was heavy mist blowing in front of my face. So it was a very unique, a weird sensation.

Last year was totally opposite. My numbers - it's just one of those years. I don't know if the wind was blowing in or it was a little cold or the balls were flying out. If I did it every year, there would be something to it. But last year was totally opposite, so I have no clue what the difference is.

Last year we saw (Tony) Stewart have trouble as well as (Jeremy) Mayfield and they never seemed to rebound after that, ... It's just the pace. In a lot of ways it's like a golf tournament. If you start off and you're four- or five-under and the other guys are waffling around with a bogey and a par, they're not gonna catch you. It's up to the leader to make those mistakes and we did have a big mistake at Atlanta with the motor blowing up. That took away our solid advantage, so when you have a bad race early on it's just that much more difficult to overcome later on.