Anthony Rizzo Quotes

You can't go up there trying to get hits. You can just go up there trying to put together at-bats and square the baseball up.

When you're going into a game, you're not expected to hit a home run every game. You're just doing everything proper with proper swings.

I have to go with the approach I had in Triple-A. I need to take a lot of those fastballs I am seeing to left field. Also must gear up for the changeup and take them up the middle.

But hitting is so crazy. You feel great today and get three hits. And the next day you show up and it's, 'What happened to my mechanics? Where's my swing?' Sometimes I even Google it and the search comes up with no results.

You never want to lose a strength, but I've also got to try and be a complete hitter.

Hitting is business. With two strikes you really protect that plate.

Some batters, and good ones too, scoff at the whole theory of place hitting, calling it a myth. They are wrong, however.

To be a good hitter you've got to do one thing - get a good ball to hit.

Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80% of being a successful hitter. The other 20% is just execution.

The fellows that I played with encouraged me to bunt and beat the ball out. I was anxious to make good and did as I was told. When I came to Brooklyn, I adopted an altogether different style of hitting. I stood flat-footed at the plate and slugged. That was my natural style.

Working my way through different formats has not changed my batting approach much.

If a pitcher goes up there and he's throwing a ball and it's a breaking ball down and away or a fastball up and in, a perfect pitcher's pitch, and you're able to just foul it off and stay alive in the at-bat, just keep grinding, keep working through the at-bat and hoping for that mistake that he's going to make. And if he doesn't, then you walk.

The biggest thing is, you don't hit the good sliders; you just hit the mistakes. That's what my thing has always been: Just keep hunting mistakes.

Once I found my swing, I feel like if I put a good swing on it, I feel like it's got a good chance to go wherever - left, right, center - it doesn't matter. But I'm not just out here going to swing for home runs of anything. I'm just trying to put a good swing on the baseball.

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

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.

I was kind of a slap hitter, trying to get base hits, hit line drives, stay below a certain trajectory with my ball.

If you hit a routine fly ball in the big leagues, you're out every time. If you hit a ground ball, you're probably out a lot of the time as well. But there's a happy medium in there, a way to swing where your misses can still lead to successes.

When I'm at the plate, I'm not thinking about what I'm trying to do with the bat - I'm thinking about what the pitcher is trying to do with the ball.

I try to think shorter swing with two strikes. That's how I was raised and taught the game of baseball.

I never talked about launch angle, never mentioned launch angle. I know there's a lot of people probably hoping that I would say that because that's just the trend in baseball.

Before a big acting competition, my dad sent me a note that said, 'Define the moment. Don't let the moment define you.'

You never hit a good slider or curveball; you just try to go after the mistakes.

Mentality is a big part of every game, when you take the initiative and when you drop.

Everything is a learning lesson, good and bad, so I am happy with the way things are, and I learned from everything negative. I am in a great space now, so I wouldn't change a thing!