Juan Marichal Quotes

I was short with my fastball and breaking ball.

If a pitcher makes a mistake inside, I'm going to hit it.

Greaseball, greaseball, greaseball, that's all I throw him (Rod Carew), and he still hits them. He's the only player in baseball who consistently hits my grease. He sees the ball so well, I guess he can pick out the dry side.

Hitters are too big, too strong, and their bats are too quick. I have to go inside to have success.

Greg Maddux is probably the best pitcher in all of baseball along with Roger Clemens. He's much more intelligent than I am because he doesn't have a 95 or 98 mph fastball. I would tell any pitcher who wants to be successful to watch him, because he's the true definition of a pitcher.

My pitching philosophy is simple. I believe in getting the ball over the plate and not walking a lot of men.

I threw all my pitches over the top which was important for me because my slider was hard to tell from my fastball at release.

The great hitters use the whole field, and that's a goal of mine.

The big thing I noticed from High-A to Double-A is that when you have an advantage count as a hitter, you're not going to get as many fastballs. Adjusting to the 2-0 changeup, that 3-1 off-speed pitch - things like that. I think my swing can stay the same; I just was getting myself out.

I think my job is to keep the ball down. I always say I try to go out there and get early contact, and strikeouts just seem to happen.

That's one thing I learned from watching great hitters hit. A lot of hitters, they're ready to hit from pitch one.

I want to focus more on my pitches, not on the tempo. After that, I felt more comfortable.

Once I get completely right mechanically and with command, maybe I only use two or three pitches to get through seven innings.

I got into a bad habit of dropping my elbow and pushing the ball to the plate instead of getting on top of it and using some leverage to get it down in the strike zone or get some depth with the ball.

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.

When you're spinning a two-seam, getting on the side of the ball to get more run or sink can be good, but it can really be detrimental to your four-seam.

You worry about how you're throwing the ball, how you're executing your pitches.

That's why it's so important to have that gap between your fastball and off-speed pitches: then, when you effectively locate your fastball, it plays at a higher velocity.

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.

There are some players I always watched, various players who I knew hit the ball well.

I'll get in that habit of throwing the ball over the plate too much. You want to keep it going, get those guys back into the dugout. But it's not a good thing when you're over more than a third of the plate.

I'm trying to make sure that I get to my 0-2, 1-2 counts. That's really how I would rather phrase it: I'm trying to make sure that I can drive the count into my favor.

I could throw the ball hard, but at this level if you're not accurate, it's easy for batters to light you up with home runs. That's when I started concentrating on making my movements more compact. It just seemed to me that smaller movements would produce the kind of pitching I desired.

I've worked with Tom House and Adam Dedeaux, and both of those guys helped me out just pure mechanically.

A lot of people think pitchers, and they just think throwing and that's where all the power comes from. It's really not. It starts from the ground up. If you have a strong base, the legs will actually do the work and build all the torque and power you need to throw. So if you have weak legs at the end of the year, that's not good.