Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you don't have one that you throw for strikes - they are good hitters - they can cancel out one pitch and go to another. Now I have four pitches. If one's not working, I've got three others. It makes the game totally different.
It's funny, I can talk to Dad about races we ran, or I can remember some races he's raced when I was there working on the car. I'm sure other athletes are the same, where they can remember what pitches they threw or what plays they ran.
The Varzea is kind of like street basketball in America or like the semi-professional football leagues in Europe. The pitches are all dirt, and you're playing against the marmanjo - the 'hard men.' It's known for being extremely physical.
I trust how much my ball moves. I can throw it at you or this far off the plate and have it end up on the black. That's where I kind of went to the next level. I knew what all my pitches were doing. Even in '14, I didn't have that ability.
If you add up all the promises any politician makes, the math doesn't work. Hillary Clinton's math doesn't work; Donald's math probably doesn't work. I think you have to listen to their campaign pitches more as symbolic, more as metaphors.
I was 10 when I realised I couldn't stand football. I'd tried, obviously, before this - no one wants to give in to social pariah-hood without a fight. I had stood frozen on pitches, done some running about and shouted a lot, as though I cared.
It is all right having Atletico Madrid and Barca at the top, but what about teams like Tenerife who play on such bad pitches? These little things need to improve, but media-wise, Spanish women's football is a lot further along than in England.
Sometimes we're going to take marginal pitches on the edges and get called out on strike, but we want to get a pitch that we can drive and a pitch we can do damage on. I think when you do that, you don't necessarily chase as much out of the zone.
There's been a couple of guys who have gotten me. I used to say Adrian Gonzalez. He's a good lefty hitter; he's hit a few home runs off of me. They were a couple of mistakes, so if you make your pitches, you're more likely to have a better outcome.
When anyone pitches me - and I've heard it a million times: 'It's the black Seinfeld,' or, 'It's the new version of something that's already been successful' - I immediately shut it off. I won't ever entertain doing 'the new version of such-and-such.'
When we speak about equality, you want to be playing on the best pitches with the best facilities. You want to be able to have a hot shower in the changing room. These are the things you need to get right if you want to be more professional on the pitch.
I still think there are some pitches in this pitching arm, so I will continue playing with USA Softball, but knowing that this could be the last time a softball player stands on the Olympic podium and has the opportunity of experiencing this - it was emotional.
Trendy gadgets and edgy pitches inevitably get replaced due to the fickle nature of the buying public, but a business designed from the start to play big has the ability to weather trends and redirect itself to venues and products that its customers want and need.
Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.
Big government, global environmentalism cannot work unless everyone pitches in. With China, Russia, India and a number of other countries constantly cheating the rules of international climate agreements, it makes staying in them an expensive - yet fruitless - cause.
The big thing is, it's about learning which off-speed pitches to swing at. A lot of people say, 'Oh, this guy can't hit a curveball; this guy can't hit an off-speed pitch.' But it's about swinging at the right one. Swing at the hangers. Swing at the ones you can handle.
Americans aren't good at accents, but the English are because their accents change. You go five or six blocks and the accent is different, so they are used to hearing different pitches. In America, you gotta travel maybe 10 states before you can really hear a difference.
When I went to Australia on the India A tour in 2014, I played on flat pitches against batsmen, some of whom were Test players. That experience taught me a lot, as I also was playing with a lot of Test players in our side as well, and I learned about being mentally tough.
The game can come down to one pitch. But when you're actually out there on the mound and when you're pitching, you can't be worrying about the margin of error or whatnot. You have to go with your strengths and what you believe is the right pitch and keep executing pitches.
Working in MTV's development team, my days would consist of pitches and deciding which concepts we wanted to buy. We would then develop those into a pilot. Very few ended up making it to a full series, but if they did, I would manage the project alongside the show's creators.
You figure when you match up against other clubs and you go through the lineup one through nine, you get to the nine hole, if you can put together an at-bat or you can see some different pitches that helps give you an advantage competitively, it can make your lineup stronger.
Baseball calls it a curve ball for a reason: you just don't know where some pitches will land. Your ace could get injured. Your golden glover could err. Your team could sit through a rain delay. Your manager could get ejected. Your bench must be broad and deep enough to overcome.
Some would argue the opposite: that with better pitches you should be able to express yourself, a bit like Kevin Pietersen does. Looking back, I wish I had been a bit more like that. But I always had a fear of failure, a fear of getting out, so I tried to eliminate risk from my game.
I guess my earliest football memories are of playing in the street and also the little pitches at school. I joined the local football team in my village when I was small, but we would play only once or twice a week. I honed my skills just by playing for fun with friends after school.
The least-crowded channel for meeting high profile bloggers is in person. Email is the most difficult, the most crowded... I'm a top 1,000 blogger, not a top 100 blogger, and I get hundreds of pitches by email every week. Most of them I don't even see because my assistant declines them.
I grew up in Hockley, Birmingham. It was an environment I'll never forget in terms of playing football on local pitches, kicking a ball around in the front garden and all over the house. It was a positive place to live, and somewhere, that gave me the right grounding for where I am today.
There's a cumulative effort within the course of a game, a series, and a season, too, where you see so many pitches and have so many at-bats that you can wear down an opponent. Once you develop that reputation as a club, year after year, players come in, and they tend to fit in with that profile.
There are certain things I can't do, certain pitches I can't hit. You stay away from them. You try to wait for pitches you can hit. The bat speed isn't what it used to be. You make up for it by using your head, working counts, getting ahead in counts and getting pitches to hit and hitting them hard.
I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.
Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.
For a spinner growing up in England, it is challenging to become an off-spinner. The line and length needs to be altered on each of the four days of county cricket or five days of Test matches. The pitches in England don't have a set pattern. It changes with each day, and accordingly, the length varies.
Stadiums are full, pitches are good, the press is different, people are different, the football culture is different. Everyone talks highly of England and I'd like to experience it one day. You see more space, more opportunity to enjoy your football. It's more physical, more intense, but I think I'd be comfortable.
Sometimes you go to home plate, and you have an idea, like a clear idea, of what they're going to throw to you. I think that's all: getting better pitches to hit, realizing when you hit the ball better, what pitch you hit, if you're chasing too much. If you figure out all that, you can get a little better as a player.
Some guys, first pitch of the at-bat gets called a strike - maybe it's a ball off or below their knees, and it gets called a strike - and then the next two pitches, they swing at balls in the dirt, and all of a sudden, they're yelling at the umpire about that first pitch. You just swung at two balls in the dirt, buddy.
I had a great time being a salesman because of the pitches that I gave when I was selling shoes. However, I don't think I'm as well versed in shoes as I am in comedy. Being a salesman was all about being a people person, and I enjoy being around people. I also love talking to people - which is why I think I did so well.
In terms of writing and developing, TV is very open because TV needs stories. They need new pitches, and they need new ideas. They don't always take the risk for new ideas, but they are certainly open to it. They can't have enough people come in and pitch to them. It doesn't matter how they look or what gender they are.
A writer can spend a decade working obsessively on a novel, but in the commerce of publishing, many of the most important decisions about any book will be made based on very short pitches - from literary agent to editor to sales rep to bookstore buyer to a potential reader standing in the bookstore, asking, 'What's it about?'
When you have an injury in your forearm, it affects the command of your pitches. I would yank pitches down away, or they were staying up. I'd go to accelerate, but everything would come forward except the ball. The ball was staying behind. When you have an inconsistent release point like that, it's impossible to throw a changeup.
Our family business was operating batting cages. The pitching machine spit out the balls at lightning speed. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax. Whitey Ford. 50 cents for 12 pitches. Of course, my mother ran the place, and I was her slave: selling candy, hosing down the street, and the most dreaded of all jobs, feeding the pitching machine with balls.
