Jim Courier Quotes

I wanted to be a professional baseball player.

Just about every Latin American country has sent players to the big leagues, from the Dominican Republic to Costa Rica.

I heard that in the United States the level of baseball was the highest in the world. So it was only natural that I would want to go there, as a baseball player.

I know I never saw Casey Stengel when I was being scouted. And how could you be in a ballpark and not know if Casey Stengel was there?

It needs to be said, over and over again, that Stan the Man was voted by 'The Sporting News' as the best baseball player of the postwar decade, from 1946 through 1955.

I figured that pitchers had a better chance of getting drafted than fielders, so I decided I should be a pitcher. But I never expected to be picked in the first round. I wasn't even sure I'd get picked at all.

Darryl Strawberry has been voted to the Hall of Fame five years in a row.

At my growing years of 18 to 21 years old in the Minor Leagues, I dreamed of being a Philadelphia Phillie.

I was a professional baseball player from the time I was drafted out of high school in 1981 until the time I retired in 2003.

When I was growing up, I always had the dream of being an analyst for a minor league baseball team or something like that.

You can win a world title now ranked as seven, eight or nine in the world, and say you are a champion, because you have a version of it.

I played good ball in the minor leagues, and that's why they called me up to the major leagues.

I think people realize that I'm one of the best welterweights, whether I'm number one or number four or number five or number six.

I've been on a 1-15 team.

I grew up playing football and baseball and moved on to play college baseball, and, you know, as a kid, my dream was to play professional baseball.

If you can play football, you can play football. Measurables at the combine don't change that.

I was definitely nervous for the combine. You train for three months to go out there and perform for three days.

When I was in Seattle, I listened to Carlos Guillen and other older players.

The last thing I wanted to do was get buried in Triple-A behind prospects.

The press often ask me about Messi and Ronaldo and who is the best, but one thing for me is very clear. For me, the No. 1 is Andres Iniesta, because he is my team-mate for Spain, and I can see that he is able to do even more difficult things on the pitch.

Baseball, in my opinion, would be a lot better if you could just make the same salary as everybody else in the world, and you don't deal with any of the other stuff. But that's not how it is. The main thing is I want to pitch against the best players in the world, and you can't do that playing in a pickup baseball league in your town.

I've been a baseball fan in the early part of my life, so through the '70s and the '80s, I was a huge fan. I actually followed the Dodgers back then, back in the Kirk Gibson years, Steve Garvey.

While most American labor unions have struggled for the past several decades, professional baseball players comprise one of the strongest packs of organized workers in the world.

I love baseball and love the Indians and all the teams here.