That guy's really good when he's healthy. That's what I think. I mean, he's really, really good when he's healthy.

We worked really hard and we worked a lot on the fundamentals of the game and making the basic plays. With special athletes, sometimes that fundamental play gets lost. I know when I first came up, the ball I had the most trouble with was the ball hit right at me, because I assumed I could make that routine play.

You better hit the yellow! I want to see you hit one into the lights.

He's just put it all together. He's a fantastically talented, strong, gifted athlete. But with all those characteristics sometimes comes absent-mindedness and lack of attention to detail. Those are some of the things we can't have as shortstops. So that's what we worked on. Everything else has kind of blossomed.

My message to a lot of guys is, if you like school and you like education, baseball is gonna be there, and you can get some of the same great competition in college that you do in the low minor leagues.

The stance I took was there is no room for racial bias anywhere in sports. I believe that was basically all I said about it. Certainly I was cast as an abolitionist. Death threats came. Hate mail came.