Lance Niekro Quotations

One ball moves this way, one ball moves that way.

I worked on my stance, and it felt good to get some good at-bats and a couple of hits off right-handers. I'm trying to reverse it a bit.

He'd put me on his shoulders and let me try to rob home runs like he did. When you're a kid, you have that energy all the time. You don't realize how long the season is. But Kirby was like us. He was a big kid.

My mom has the baseball package and we watched the games. It was a weird feeling, like we made the playoffs and I didn't make the playoff roster.

It felt good to have two at-bats like that to start the season and move further along.

It doesn't matter what has happened to him in the past. With one swing, he can hit the ball a mile.

That's what we needed to realize -- we can do that on a daily basis.

It's going well, but I have to keep working hard.

It's hard to believe we're not out of this but we aren't.

It was nice for me to go where some of my family had so much success, and to have so much family here.

It was great to comeback in the bottom of the ninth. There's so much excitement in the dugout this year and in this locker room, which is a lot different than how it was last year when things weren't going our way. Everyone's just rooting hard down there and its just a lot of fun to be on this team right now.

I'd love to get more patient at the plate. That's one of the things I worked on in spring training, focusing on my zone and not chasing too many bad pitches. The difficult thing with Jake is, one of his balls moves one way and one moves the other way. It felt good to have two at-bats like that to start the season.

He always tells me every time we talk that this is the chance we've been waiting for. This is the year I've got to go out and prove myself. He's telling me things I already know. He just wants to make sure he etches them in my head and I take advantage of this opportunity.