In 1962 I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the bigs.
You know, I was once named Minor League Player of the Year... unfortunately, I had been in the majors for two years at the time.
Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they'll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I'm sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.
I stayed attached to baseball through the kids and through minor league baseball, and I'm very satisfied with the schedule it allows me to have, which means I'm home until my kids go off to college. I value that time.
I think about my dad and how tough he had it. They treated us a lot better in our minor league system, especially with the food. But the bus rides were no joke.
If you look at poker as a sport like baseball, then I'd be maybe a minor league or high school ballplayer. But I play with T-ballers.
I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.
I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we'd go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That's what passed for Baltimore sports.
I am involved in minor league baseball. I go around the country speaking to troubled youths, trying to help them understand that whatever path they choose, they'll need to really pay attention to it.
You can't say it's good when guys out there are signing minor league deals and they would be big league players on 80 percent of the teams, but why would a team sign a player when you can pay dirt, and they're not going to win anyway?
