You don't project yourself in the Hall of Fame as a player. It's only during that five-year period where people start asking about it, and it doesn't seem real until it happens.

Being elected to the Hall of Fame is about your career pretty much and your impact on the game.

When you're an athlete and you play every day and are conditioning yourself every year, the aging is gradual.

You learn as a player not to listen to the criticism. Many of the people who put out that criticism might not be as accomplished, might not understand the game as well from the inside-out.

Your job as a baseball player is to come to the park ready to play every day, and the manager, it's his job to make those decisions about who plays.

A lot of people think I had such a rosy career, but I wanted to identify that one of the things that helps you have a long career is learning how to deal with adversity, how to get past it. Once I learned how to get through that, others things didn't seem so hard.