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Obviously, I love Boston. I love the passion. It kind of matches my personality. The fans, I almost feel like they're just as passionate as me.
I'm going to tell you right now, no one is harder on me than me. The fact that fans sit there and boo me, I'm booing myself when I'm walking in.
Obviously, I have to do what's best for me and my family; I've got to put that first. But I definitely want to be on a team that's in contention.
All through Miami, the guys who grew up with me hitting at the place I hit, they all call me Flaco. Nobody calls me J.D. It's like, 'Hey, Flaco.'
That's why, to me, Spring Training is so hard, because every time you go up there, there's a new pitcher, and you have to come up with a new plan.
Everyone here has a right to their own political beliefs and everybody has the right to stand by what they believe in. That's what makes us American.
I grew up in Miami watching baseball down there, so you could see it from one extreme to the next. It was like, 'Well, this is what baseball is about.'
I'm always just grinding and figuring out what adjustment I need to make and how to tweak my swing to where I want it to be for that game and that pitcher.
I busted my butt in '15. Then in '16, I broke my arm running into a wall, so then I got scared of running into walls because I didn't want to get hurt again.
I have so many memories of going fishing and camping as a kid, and my dad had season tickets to watch the Marlins - and that's where I fell in love with the game.
To me grinding out a good at-bat is pretty much fighting. And it's not trying to do too much with pitches, just finding a way to spoil a good pitcher's pitches, really.
I think my failures in Houston is what made me who I am. I think it's given me that drive, that drive to keep working, because you never know what can happen type deal.
When you're up there and everything feels good and you're competing against the pitcher and the pitcher strikes you out, you're like, 'OK, yeah, I struck out, but that's OK.'
Paul Goldschmidt, who gave me the confidence to lead as one of the game's greatest players, acknowledged that what I had to say was valuable to my teammates and crucial to winning.
I played street basketball for a while and wanted to play competitively, but I was so used to the street-style of game that I would have fouled out by the end of the first quarter.
Contrary to everyone's belief of 'J.D. is a launch-angle guy. He wants to get the ball in the air and this and that.' This is true, but you're not trying to force situations, trying to force things.
I mean, I learned a lot from Houston. And you know what? It made me who I am and there's really no animosity there. In a sense, they did me a favor by allowing me to leave and going to play on another team.
I was able to play alongside, in my opinion, the best hitter with Miguel Cabrera and kind of watch the way he goes about it and the way he looks at situations, when to try to drive a ball versus when to shoot a ball.
You know, this league is all about adjustments, and the one thing you kinda notice when you're playing every day is how teams make adjustments. Once you start having a little bit of success, they are going to make their adjustment.
You can't say it's good when guys out there are signing minor league deals and they would be big league players on 80 percent of the teams, but why would a team sign a player when you can pay dirt, and they're not going to win anyway?
Man, it literally starts from after the game. I get every at-bat sent to me from the game. I'll go home, I'll watch every at-bat, kind of break down the game, kind of see, OK, what did I do? Why'd I miss this pitch? Why'd I hit that pitch?
I've always been hungry, but when people ask what drives you - 'How do you stay so driven throughout this whole thing?' - you just don't stop. It's every single day. The people that know me and the people that love me and are in my life see it.
I'm a very analytical guy, I like to study my swing, I like to study what my back foot is doing, my elbow, whatever it might be, and there's a lot of guys nowadays that are like that. That's the trend of the game, that's the way the game has gone.
I had to lower my hands, I had to work my hips a different way. I also had to stride to get the power. I'd always been a standstill hitter and had to generate power from my upper body. Basically, I had to change everything I was doing. It was really difficult.
Starting in middle school, I would play on two or three baseball teams at the same time, because that's just how things worked in south Florida. I would practice six or seven days each week. I honestly don't know how my parents did it, but my dad always found a way to make it to each and every game.
People are always asking if I was mad at Houston. Honestly, I'm not. The truth of the matter is that when I was there, I didn't perform and they actually did me a favor by cutting me loose. They could have really held me there, not let me leave, bury me in Triple-A, put me behind some prospects and I would never even play.
It's easy to sit there in the dugout when the game's going on and talk, chitchat about this and that. But I think paying attention, watching the pitcher, watching the game develop, putting yourself in situations you're not even in yet, anticipating the game, stuff like that, I think that really helps you take that extra step.
I think that's one of the things you start learning from being hot and playing every day at the beginning, you know. The league, they made their adjustments and their change to you, the way they pitch you, the way they attack you, and just learning and learning from that and making the adjustments the very next at bat or the very next pitch.
If a pitcher goes up there and he's throwing a ball and it's a breaking ball down and away or a fastball up and in, a perfect pitcher's pitch, and you're able to just foul it off and stay alive in the at-bat, just keep grinding, keep working through the at-bat and hoping for that mistake that he's going to make. And if he doesn't, then you walk.