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I had 12 years under my belt of baseball at the amateur level before I got to the big leagues.

Well, I wanted to play twenty years in the major leagues. I never made it twenty though. I played nineteen.

Even after I played ten years of ball, I still felt like I had to play well or somebody might take my place. They had plenty of players in the minor leagues who were good enough to come up and take your job, and I think that kept us going all of the time. I hustled and put that extra effort in all of the time.

I learned a lot in the Minor Leagues, spending six years there. I honed my skills, as far as coaching goes. I was able to work with the players in a lot of facets of the game.

So I don't really believe that how many years you've had in the league determines how well your players play... Coaching is coaching.

I think the average MLB career now is just a few years. The quote that has always resonated with me is 'We're going to be former players a lot longer than we were current players.'

I started in the lowest league in baseball, and I worked my way all the way up to Triple A and then to the big leagues. I never reached the level that I thought I would reach as a player. But that's the way it goes. So then I started from the bottom as a manager, and I worked my way up to managing the Dodgers for 20 years.

I just felt all along that if I could get a certain amount of years in the league, have great years and still have my health when I walked away, that would be great.

From the time I was 3, I wanted to be a major-league player. To accomplish that at 35, get my name on my jersey, be in the clubhouse with major-league players, see my family for the first time in three months, be in my home state and pitch the day I got called up, was incredible.

There were a lot of players who worked just as hard as I did, and if you didn't, you didn't stay in the big leagues.