If I worried about appearances, I wouldn't be at Cubs games.
Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine. And that's really living.
Jamie Moyer was in his third year as a major league pitcher and was, by his own admission, still wide-eyed, watching everything going on around him and soaking it in. He paid particular attention to older teammates on his Chicago Cubs squad, hoping to emulate habits that had allowed those veterans to extend their careers.
In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples.
I'm certainly thankful for what the Cubs did for me. I respect their organization. It's the same way with the Atlanta Braves, an awfully fine organization. I respect everybody who's down there, and that's still where I live today. But the Cardinals represent the best years of my career.
I would want to go to the future, 25 years in the future, and see if the Cubs ever win a World Series.
Once a Cubs fan, always a Cubs fan.
Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.
Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.
People ask me a lot about the values I got from playing for the Cubs for so many years. The value I got out of it was patience. A lot of people these days are not very patient.