Interview #27: The Field of Infinite Possibilities
Mike Murphy, baseball coach, businessman and now bestselling author
Intro
So this interview started on topic with baseball, Mike’s baseball-playing father, talking about when he coached some of my friends and I in Senior League in early high school. When I interviewed Vik earlier, he mentioned Mr. Murphy as one of his favorite coaches, and that’s true for me as well. So I tracked him down, asked if he wanted to chat and he agreed.
I was excited, hadn’t talked to him since I bought a truck from his dealership just after high school. I miss that truck. I miss it so much. A little background is he was born in 1957 in Ohio, moved to the Bay Area as a teenager and had a successful Chevrolet dealership for many years. He tells much of the rest of his story below, but it (spoiler) winds up with him now opening a wellness retreat in Medellin, Colombia. Anyways, Mike had already been through a lot before we crossed paths, and since then he has gone through even more major heartache and the highest highs and lowest lows. So there’s a lot there, and possibly something that you the reader could relate to.
But then we went on a magic carpet ride. It was 10am on a Saturday morning and I was not prepared to be taken on a spiritual journey to discover my chi, prana and quantum existence. Since this project is about people with baseball as the background theme, let’s see where this takes us. If you’d like to smoke a bowl first, put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and light some incense, I’ll give you a moment to prepare oneself for the journey.
Links
Mike’s website: mikemurphyunfiltered.com
A second website: thecreationfrequency.com
Love From Margo Foundation: lovefrommargot.org
YouTube: @MikeMurphyUnfiltered
The Creation Frequency: Tune In to the Power of the Universe to Manifest the Life of Your Dreams (Amazon)
Love Unfiltered: Tear Down Your Walls, Open Your Heart, Live Your Life On Purpose (Amazon)
The problem child
Is baseball still a part of your life? Or was it in the past?
“Yes. A huge part of my life, actually. My dad played triple-A baseball. He really credits baseball for probably saving his life to a certain extent, youth baseball. He grew up in Los Angeles. He played with guys like my godfather, Johnny James, pitched for the Yankees and then the Angels. I know Don Drysdale was around that area. Sparky Anderson, who ended up managing the Cincinnati Reds. So my dad got to triple-A baseball with Tucson for the Cleveland organization, I think he hit 38 home runs one year (note: it was 33, in 1954. Rob Murphy Baseball Reference Page). He says he quit because he couldn't hit the curveball, but I think he really quit because he wanted to marry my mom. So he quit playing baseball at age 21.”
“I have video of me at 3, 4 years old in the backyard throwing a baseball against one of those rebounders wearing a Yankees jacket that my godfather gave me. So baseball was important as a kid growing up. I played it, I umpired it. I was a really good shortstop and backup pitcher. I had a really good arm, but going from 8th grade to 9th grade, I found girls and beer and that was the end of my baseball career.”
Really? I think beer and girls is the main fuel for baseball players.
“Yeah, but we ended up moving, too. I ended up running away from home at 14, became a juvenile delinquent, getting kicked out of all these schools. So when I should have turned right, I turned left, and it took me a few years to recover from that.”
So you enjoyed playing right?
“I loved it, man. I grew up in Ohio, Cincinnati, and baseball's a big thing there. Big Red Machine. Pete Rose, Johnny Bench. I lived for baseball. I played the other sports as well, but during baseball season… I can still feel the disappointment of a big game and waking up and it's raining and you know the game’s going to get cancelled. So yeah, I loved baseball as a kid.”
So when you when you moved, when you got into high school, was baseball not interesting anymore? Like if you'd wanted to play baseball, you would have had to stay in school.
“Yeah, I got kicked out of three high schools in Cincinnati. We moved to Danville, I went to Monte Vista. It was 1973, they were doing an experiment. They had all these hippie teachers from Berkeley that smoked pot all day long, and they were going to treat us as college kids. So we didn't have to go to class, there were no bells. I moved there late in my sophomore year. I didn't do a darn thing my junior and senior year. I literally spent the time in the bathroom pitching quarters, playing blackjack, smoking and drinking, and that was my high school education at Monte Vista.”
I hear and have heard lots of stories about kids with baseball-playing dads and how that helped them either get in the sport or succeed elsewhere. In this case, it sounds like that didn’t happen. And instead of grounders and batting practice, he enjoyed beers and girls and the more destructive parts of his dad’s personality. I think one of his also wrote a song based on their times hanging out in the Monte Vista boy’s room:
Coaching Philosophy and more
So when you were a successful businessman and you, like you said, you thought it and it came true, but you also had to put in the work, right? So did anything you learned from baseball have any help with the actual work of succeeding?
“Yeah, absolutely. Because in business you have to build a team? And that's my biggest struggle here in Colombia. I'll be honest with you. One: I'm so stupid and lazy I haven't bothered to learn the language, which is a huge issue. So #2, Colombian philosophy is not like American philosophy. We are programmed to become workers. OK, we show up in second grade at 8:00 AM. We get a little water break at 10, we get lunch and then we get another break at two and blah blah blah. We're programmed to watch that clock and they're programming us to become workers. That's the education here.
This is more a socialist type of country, for example. They have 25 three day weekends. OK, so they have 25 holidays, I think we have 5 or 6 maybe. The other thing is they're not gonna buy into building something and getting rewarded down the road. No, they wanna get paid now for what they do now. And they're not thinking down the road like we do. You know, I built a business and like many, many businesses in America, I did it by building the team. OK, listen, man, you're the team. We're gonna do this if we create this. If we don't, we get nothing. I can't really pull that kind of teamwork here like in America. And I'm trying to do it here slowly. It's just harder here. Slowly but surely, I'm building a good team here.
Listen, what is baseball? You know, it's all chemistry. You know, this is what the Mystery Man was teaching me. It's all wavelengths. You know, you got to be on the same wavelength, same frequency, the same energy, right? So of course, when you're building a successful baseball team, you know, I'm thinking back to some of our games right now. I always felt like we were the underdogs, and I always felt like the other teams had a lot more talent. But because we were a team, we had guys like you guys, like Vik, I always felt our team was a little more passionate, a little more excited, a little more inspired and we had some really big victories as a result of that, probably games we shouldn't have won. So there has to be some sort of chemistry and teamwork.
But the other thing in baseball is this, you have to do some homework and then have a plan. If you're gonna be a third baseman, you gotta know what you’re gonna do when you go to your left, to the right, when the guy’s on 2nd. So planning, teamwork, organization, discipline. All of those things come from baseball and are applicable to not only business but to a good family life and all these things. So all the principles of success are the same.”
I mean there was reason more than one person said that you were one of their favorite coaches, and it wasn't just because you taught them how to field a ground ball.
“I loved coaching you guys. I remember you, you were a hell of a lot skinnier back then. What was unique about you, you had enormous talent, but you didn't believe it. And so I was always trying to get you to believe in yourself because you had a raw talent. I just remember you, and every once a while you would shock yourself. Of course, I wasn't surprised when you did something dramatic but you would kind of shock yourself. Whatever happened to your baseball career after that?”
Let’s move on.
What was about coaching that gave you satisfaction?
“So I started coaching with my son Michael when he was 13. So 13 through17, I would say six years.”
And then you were also teaching Bible school. Was that similar to what drew you to coaching?
“Of course. So my spiritual journey has been rather unique. I was baptized Catholic, raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, didn't believe any of that and got into a 12 step program. I lived in that spirituality that led me to becoming a born again Christian. But then I kind of became their poster boy for saving souls and they’d take me around and have me speak, sing Amazing Grace, and all this. So I kind of got tired of that. But the longest period of my life was that experience and I raised my kids that way.
I've now come to believe that there is a creator that I call God, but it's more inclusive. The Christians, it's our way or the highway. The Muslims, it's our way or the highway. The Jews, it's our way or the highway. I believe that there's one creator and we’re all welcome and invited in to serve that creator and honor that creator. I'm not religious in any way. I'm more embracing, you know, I've gotten really deep into quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and understanding energy and what's really going on here.
We live in a place called duality. You can't have hot without cold. You can't have good without evil. You can’t have black without white. And so that's why we have this confusion here because we come from singularity, which is just love, peace, joy. And then we come into this world of duality, but we're in an animal body. We urinate, we fornicate, we defecate. But we're spirit. That's why it's so difficult, right. We have to balance who we really are, our soul, with this human experience, which is just temporary. Our our soul is infinite, our energy, our consciousness, our true essence is infinite, and we got to play this game here. And so that's where it gets a little confusing.
Now, of course, today it has become super confusing because I believe we're going through a major shift. So the elite, the powerful, the trillionaires, all these people, they're shooting for a great reset. Well, the great reset that they envision is a lot less of us, a lot more artificial intelligence, and a lot less freedom for humanity. Where on the other side, there's a great awakening. What does that mean? I think people are waking up to the truth over here and how it is a slave system and how it is controlled and how we're paying all these taxes and we're really being stolen from because they're taking this money and not using it for good. They're using it to create chaos.
And so these people over here that want to create a community based on unity, integrity, responsibility, there's this battle going on. I go back to my roots in Catholicism, which says basically there's a battle versus good and evil. And then I've done all these other, you know, Christianity to Islam, to Hinduism, to Judaism, to all these other religions that I’ve studied, and at the end of the day, it's good versus evil. And I think that's what's coming. If you read the Bible, it would say these are the end times, or the apocalypse. So apocalypse means the lifting of the veil, so it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz. We're getting to see the man behind the curtain and it's not what we thought. We need to create a world rid of this divisiveness and create unity or humanity could be in trouble.”
So… that’s a bit deeper than I’ve gone on this project so far. But I will say, all the people I’ve talked to so far, regardless of their background, age, economic status, etc., they all feel more and more disconnected with baseball. They feel neglected by players and teams as they take more and more, so that does fit in with what you’ve just said with the increasing divisiveness.
“I haven't watched a baseball game in a million years. And I'll tell you why. I think the biggest problem in baseball started in the 60s. When I was growing up, we had the Big Red Machine. So every year Pete Rose was back, Bench was back, Davey Concepcion was back, Ken Griffey Sr. was back, Joe Morgan was back, right? So we had the same team every year. I want to say it was ‘67 or ‘68 and we had the guy, Curt Flood with the St. Louis Cardinals challenge this reserve clause and say, hey, wait, I want to be able to go to another team. I don't want to be locked into this team, right? Well, what happened after free agency is that everybody started going everywhere.
I'll give you a prime example. When I was coaching you guys, we would bring guys like Tim Hudson out. So I had access to Tim Hudson because the day he was called up from triple-A, I literally got him at the airport and gave him a car to drive. So we have this relationship and I say, hey, Tim, can you do me a favor to come out and work with my pitchers. I become friends with Tim Hudson, I start supporting his Make-a-Wish Foundation golf tournament. I'm spending a lot of money. I'm giving donations. I'm doing all this stuff, and then four years later, five years later, he's traded to Atlanta, and that relationship is out the window.
So who runs baseball now? Who runs the world? Let's get there. It's all big corporations. Big corporations run everything. There's no local hardware store. There's no local barber shop. Everything is a chain in a corporation. Well, what's the difference? Well, me as a local business man, I have a heart and I have a soul and I have a reputation and I have pride, so I'm gonna take care of my customers. These big corporations, you think they give a darn about us? Heck no. Go call United Airlines or or try to get a hold of someone at Facebook or Google. It's impossible. They treat us like slaves because a corporation has no heart, no soul, no integrity. They have one motive, and that's to get a return on investment for their shareholders and they don't care if they lie, cheat and steal. What we've thrown out the window is integrity and I see that as the biggest issue in the world today. Very, very few people have integrity and, no corporations have integrity. And without integrity then it's the Wild West all over again. We're just not shooting each other with six shooters. We're stealing from each other with dishonest marketing.
So when you apply that to baseball, it's all about money. All those seats, all those boxes are big corporations that get the tax write off. So it's only costing them half, right? And guys like you and me, we can't even afford to go to a game or take our kids to the game.”
When did you really stop being a sports fan?
“Yeah, I think, the gambling, you have the fantasy which is kind of like gambling. Then you have people with too much time on their hands and aren't contributing a lot to society. Everybody and their brother has a podcast show and so everybody's listening to these podcasts, but who's working? And and if you're not a podcaster, then you're an influencer. Influencing people and what people don't also realize about America, which really scares me right now, is 70% of the US economy is based on people buying crap they don't need with money they don't have.”
Okay, first, I was not a good baseball player. But anyways, next, while it was a very detailed, winding explanation Mike just dropped on that question, it does have a core nugget in there that is a common theme with everyone I’ve met with so far. And that is the growing divide between the haves (professional athletes, owners, corporations) and the have-nots (fans, consumers). In the more serious topics like homelessness, inflation and unemployment, that’s obviously one thing. But even seeing it apply to discretionary spending, like sports events, you see the love for the game but also the hesitance, reluctance and inability to afford to be a fan anymore. But while the owners get theirs, who really cares that beer is $14.50 for 12 ounces?
The Mystery Man
So after high school, what what were you doing?
“It took me a long time to get my life together. I found someone dumb enough to marry me at age 21. At 23, we had a baby, and then two months later I walked out on them. I just couldn't get my life together. I was a total mess and a disaster. And then, of course, when I tried to come back home, my parents always took me back home. She didn't, so we ended up getting divorced.
I'm in a 12 Step program and a buddy says to me, ‘I've never seen anybody as messed up as you, but I might know somebody that can help you.’ And he introduced me to this fellow by the name of Doug Fitzgerald. I wrote a book about him. My first book is called Love Unfiltered. In that book, I call him the Mystery Man. My second book, I really wanted to nail down this manifestation, law of attraction process using the power of your own voice.
I’m about 24. He said, ‘Mike, you come here one hour a week for seven weeks, I promise you'll get everything you want in your life.’ So he taught me this process, using the sound of your voice, using the law of attraction manifestation. And that was the beginning of me turning my life around, becoming a very successful business person, and now a successful author, and now I'm building this retreat center here in Colombia.”
So when we crossed paths, you were in the successful businessperson stage.
“So you met me probably around 2003. I met this guy in 1982, so you saw 21 years of what I manifested, which were very expensive homes, a very successful family, a very successful business. I was coaching baseball and teaching Bible study at the local church and that was my life when you met me.
Probably during that time when I was coaching you guys, my life started to unravel. I met someone very special that created a lot of turmoil in my life. She got breast cancer, which created a lot more turmoil in my life, and she passed away, which created an enormous amount of turmoil in my life. And then I started a nonprofit foundation and really got to see the truth about the medical system in America and the flaws that it apparently has, so that kind of changed the destiny of my life from a wealthy car dealer to becoming someone that's trying to make a difference in the world.”
So when you were with the Mystery Man, he began to turn your life around from God-knows-where you would have ended up to… was it a straight-to-success thing or were there ups and downs?
“It was pretty darn quick. I'll give you the concept real simply. He said, ‘Mike, you have to create a balanced life.’ So he broke my life into six areas: relationships, career, money, all that kind of stuff. And then he said there's no difference between imagination and reality. So whatever you can imagine, you can manifest and bring to you. Now I've been able to study this for 20 years, I know exactly how it works. I didn't know anything at the time. I just trusted this guy because my life was so messed up. So we would write an Intention as if it already exists. For example, I wanted to own my own business. At that time, I had no credit but bad credit. I couldn't rub two nickels together. I was living on someone's couch. So I really had no hope to create a business, right? But the Intention I wrote was like this: ‘I love owning my own business. I love how my team members love working here. I love how our customers love us so much and they tell all their friends about it.’
So I'm writing this powerful Intention as if it already exists, right? And I did it with relationships, I did it with money, I did it with buying a house. I did all these things. So week 7 comes along, now I have 6 Intentions written down, one or two paragraphs, very short. He brings out a boom box and he puts in a cassette tape of theta brain wave music. He hands me a microphone that's attached to a tape recorder, he hands me a relaxation script. He says, ‘I want you to read the relaxation script. Follow what it says. Then read your six Intentions. We'll record it and you'll be done.’ So I do all that, I leave 7 weeks later, I got a cassette tape with theta brain wave music embedded with a relaxation script and six Intentions that I wrote as if they already exist. And he said, listen every morning right when you wake up and listen every night before you go to bed.
Well within four months, I own my own restaurant. So this stuff does work. So what happened? So how did that happen? There's a couple of powerful things here. One, you have to understand that our subconscious mind, which is our superpower, is running the show. We're only conscious and paying attention to the present 5% of the time, so the subconscious is running the show. How powerful is the subconscious? Right now, your subconscious is taking in 1,000,000 bits of data every second. A million bits of data. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But it can only deliver 40 bits of data to my conscious mind, because that's all my conscious mind can handle.
Well, the subconscious doesn't judge. So if I walk around all day and say my life sucks, nothing ever goes right, everything always falls apart, my subconscious doesn't judge and is going to look for 40 bits of information that supports that belief system and that's why we get in these ruts. Now when I tell my subconscious mind that I love owning my own business and I love my customers and I love my colleagues, I’m programming my subconscious mind to manifest that.
I've come to believe that we live in this field of infinite possibilities. We can't see it, but that doesn't mean it's not here. Nikola Tesla said if you want to understand the universe, you have to understand energy, vibration, frequency. He called this energy plasma. He said it was free energy and we didn't need to pay for electricity. The Chinese call this energy chi. The Indians call this energy prana. The Bible calls it ether. Doctor Joe Dispenza, who's probably one of the greatest teachers in the world today, especially around meditation, he calls it the field of infinite possibility.
Whatever it is, once I can envision this right here, see it in my mind's eye, and then when I'm listening to these Intentions, this sound, which, sounds and thoughts and intentions are electrical energy. We have electrical beams. We live in an electrical universe. So this electrical thought goes into the field of infinite possibilities and we live in a magnetic universe as well. It's electromagnetism, right? The heart is the magnet. The heart is 5000 times more powerful than the brain. So I put the thought, the intention into this field, I attach a lot of love and gratitude and serving the world to it. And it draws it back to you.
You can't come up with one thing in your physical existence that didn't start as a desire and intention, and then became into the physical world. Everything starts here (heart) before it becomes here (points at desk). Steve Jobs, for example, had a desire and intention for this. He put it into the field of infinite impossibilities. The right engineer showed up. The right concept showed up. The right packaging showed up. Because that's how everything works. If you want to apply the same concept in nature, we go out there and we plant a seed and something comes out of the ground, right?
The problem with this concept, this law of attraction, which is how everything is manifested, people live in a microwave society today. People want it now. They don't want to wait. Well, if you go and plant an acorn, it's going to take a few years until you get an oak tree. And so we need to understand this and be patient with this process. The the more powerful emotions are love and gratitude and service, so the more we can attach these intentions, the easier it is to bring them to our world.
So that's what happened to me. So I'm listening to this tape every morning, every night. I still don't have any money. I see a restaurant that's empty and available. I start dreaming about it. I start seeing myself in there. Cooking food, blah blah blah. But then the thought comes from the field of infinite possibilities because it's going out into this field of infinite possibility. And the thought is ‘put an ad in the newspaper and raise the money’, which I do. Within two or three weeks, I got the money raised. I go and negotiate a lease and I'm in business. This is how everything works, but we have to do a little bit of effort in the beginning and then reap the rewards later. OK, I hope that makes sense.”
I’m well aware of the power of a negative subconscious.
“As most of us are, because the subconscious, Graig, is programmed from birth to age 8. We are in this theta brain wave state. Delta is when we're asleep. Theta is when we're first coming into consciousness, and then we have alpha, which is great for creation. And then we have beta, which you and I are in right now. And then we have super gamma, which there's a whole other trick to access. But in this theta state is where we are from birth to age 8. This is why the Catholics say give us your kid until age 8 and they'll never leave the church, because they know how to program the mind. And so we're just a sponge as these little kids, and whatever our parents are doing, talking about, we absorb all that through osmosis. So that's our subconscious programming until we wake up and decide, I want to program my life my way, and that's what this man was teaching me. OK, screw how your parents programmed you, my parents programmed me to drink, gamble, chase girls. Society programmed me to do all those things, but in reality, to be successful, I needed to get clear on what I really wanted and then to have a plan to go after it. So that was the difference.”
I left this unedited, figured I wasn’t qualified to cut out any parts of that speech. Let me know if you found anything fascinating about it, it definitely made me think.
What’s gone on since I was his third baseman
Where are you?
“Well, today I'm in Medellín, Colombia where I have a business and a home, but I also live in Palm Springs and Northern California. So I have Northern California for kids, grandkids, Palm Springs to chill, and Colombia is where I work.”
OK, so those are different. What are you doing in Colombia?
“I built a retreat, a healing retreat center here, where people can come to physically detox, mentally rewire, emotionally heal, and have a spiritual awakening. Hopefully.”
Have you been doing that kind of stuff for a while?
“I've been playing with this for a while now. I lost my my second wife to breast cancer in 2011, and then I started a nonprofit foundation working with women that didn't have any money and had cancer. So I realized that the whole healthcare system there is flawed, and so maybe we can teach them a little better system here.
So what happened, frankly, is when I had the Chevrolet dealership, in 2000, this woman walked into my office to sell me Hispanic advertising on Telemundo. The day she walked into my office, she was 27, she’d been married two months. I was 43 and I married my first wife twice. I live in a $4million house and make $1million a year. I'm the last person on planet Earth ever to get a divorce, and she's the last person to ever get a divorce. She just got married, right? So the moment she walked into my office, our eyes met. There was an electrical charge that was so profound for both of us. But we didn't talk about it for seven months. For seven months, we worked together and she was falling in love with me and I was falling in love with her.
We ended up leaving our spouses and then shortly thereafter I found, when she was 28, a golf-ball sized tumor on her breast, stage 3 breast cancer. So my life, besides getting divorced with four kids and all this turmoil, then this new love of my life with this cancer, and she only lived 10 years, nine years of that, we battled the cancer. And so after she died, I was completely devastated. Lost for the first time in my life. God was able to come in, fully open my heart, take out all the bullshit, the arrogance, the self-centeredness and replace it with love.
Shortly thereafter I met another 38-year old woman who had breast cancer. Stage 4. She didn't have any money. I started helping her. That led to the foundation called the Love from Margo Foundation, which for about four or five years I would give financial grants $5000 / 5 months to these women below the poverty line. And so doing that and seeing all that, I realized that the system does not work. I saw it with my wife for nine years, so I saw all the mistakes, all the errors, all the promises that weren't kept. And then I saw it with about 100 to 200 women over a four or five year period of time. I said OK, so the first thing I did there is I started buying them water purifiers, juicing machines, vegetables. OK, let's strengthen your immune system while this medicine is destroying it. Of course, that didn't work. And then they thought I was their doctor and I'm a car salesman. So that definitely didn't work. So that's why I came to Colombia and started to build this place.”
So if she had never walked into that car dealership…
“I'd probably have 50 car dealerships in the Bay Area and be one miserable son of a bitch.”
So with or without her you were going to end up miserable at one point.
“Exactly. I went through a lot of pain and suffering to get to this point, but I wouldn't change... I would change one thing, I have one regret in my life, only one, and I've made a million mistakes. But I've learned from all of them. The one regret is when I fell in love with this woman, I should have gone home and told my wife and my kids I met someone else. I fell in love. I'm leaving your mom. I'm not leaving you kids. Everybody's gonna be taken care of financially. This might be uncomfortable, unfortunate, but we're gonna get ourselves through it, and then I would have made my life so much simpler on the other end of this. But I didn't. So I had to suffer even more for a few years to get through that.”
So after reading this whole life story, which has really gone into turbo drive since I had last seen him, obviously this is a life less than .01% of the world would or could handle. But there’s still some things that are applicable to the other 99.98%. How to handle adversity, how to reflect on how you’ve handled things and learning how to improve, and how to take your tragedies and grow from them. Whatever you may get out of this interview, you can appreciate that he went from a juvenile delinquent to turning his life around, and then when that crashed, he got up and became devoted to helping people in need.
You don’t need to study quantum physics to help your fellow man. I mean it took me three tries to pass Statistics in college, so anything with the word quantum in it is far, far above my computing power. But I feel like I’m trying to turn my own depression and recent heartbreak and all that crap, and while it sucks most days, I get the most happiness now from helping others or doing something nice for someone, whether it’s helping a hurt animal, volunteering with the Miracle League, just doing other nice things for people that I don’t need to elaborate because specifics are irrelevant.
Back to baseball
What was your favorite baseball memory?
“I can give you two when I was playing and one when I was coaching.”
The one I remember most is, I was probably in the 6th grade. So there's a really, really good team recruiting me, and I made it. I'll never forget, it's a summer night, you know, 7 PM and I'm playing short and I go to my right, I dive, now I get it and I threw it to first. So now I kind of moved towards third base and I can hear my coach and one of the dads talking because I'm new to the team. And then one of the dads says, ‘Hey, where'd you get this guy?’ He goes, ‘We just got him. And he's been making plays like this ever since we got him.’ So that made me feel good, to make a good play and then to hear someone talk about it.
And the other one was maybe the 8th grade, they're probably throwing what, 75, 80mph And I turn around to do a sacrifice bunt, hits me right here (points to ear and cheek) and, back in those days, we just had this helmet (the ones without ear flaps). You could actually see seams on my cheek where the ball hit me. So the next time I go up the bat, I wear the catchers mask. And so that got a laugh from the crowd.
And as a coach, well, one, how crazy I was. And I don't know if you were on the team at this point, but we're playing a meaningless game and it’s spring break and we only could field 8 players. My son was on a missionary trip in Mexico and the only way I could get him there in time for the game is, I literally chartered a jet and I flew to Kettleman, California (by Fresno), picked him up in at the In-n-Out parking lot and flew him back so we wouldn't have to forfeit the game. So that's kind of how insane I was. But really it was when one of you guys would do something out of character that really helped helped the team. That would make me the happiest to see somebody, you know, do something significant. That's why I did it.”
Phew.