 Okay, ready to go to the ballpark. I'm ready to go to the ballpark. Let's go. Let's go, baby. Let's go Back when you're a 25 I was 25 years old 25 years old. Okay, wait a minute 25 years old. Let me see how old it might now. Geez. Okay. Go ahead You took a very important drive from New York and you got 100 miles Into Pennsylvania and he made an important decision That affected the rest of your life Tell us about it. I think it was the second or third time that I had got sent down from the big leagues to Triple it. It came at a time where my wife Bonnie and I were expecting our first child so You know that you can do the job and the night that they sent me down I was in the bullpen and Floyd Boyer who was the pitching coach at the time He said look I got to tell you when you get to the locker room. They're probably gonna send you down again, and I asked Claude I said Claude why and he's he looked at me and he put his head down and he said because you're not pitching and You're going like well if I'm here, how can I pitch if they don't use me? When I left the ballpark I made the decision that I was going home because I had enough I was 25 26 years old With a child on the way no set job, you know, and you can't be unsure about your future So I wanted to really do something, you know, so when I got home like I said, I was upset and I told Bonnie Packed the clothes, you know, we're going home So she never said a word and we took off we got in the car and we drove and about five miles from Interstate 81 and 80 in right out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There's the sign. It says five miles Harrisburg and it shows you the interstate sign says 81 North Syracuse South Virginia So, you know, I'd always taken a right on that thing, but I was planning to go home And when we hit that sign, she knew, you know, five miles Not as a it's the passage by fast when you when you're going 80 miles an hour So she turned around and she looked at me and she said, you know, if you quit she says This is the first time I'll have ever known you to quit something before you prove to yourself You could do it or not and she said well look I'm willing to do it at least one more time if it doesn't work, then you do what you want if you want to go home That's fine So when I got to the intersection, I made the right. I went to Syracuse. It was two weeks I went back up and Things kind of changed from that point on but that's the story. I came close You know to not having a career to having a fairly good career Now if you made that left, we wouldn't be here today probably not But don't ask me what I'd be doing Do you think you ever would have gotten into food because I know from stories that you've shared before that You're a pretty big crawfish guy and you bring some of your own food Well that clubhouse for some of the guys Yeah, but all of that is just because of the food that we have and and you know learning how to cook and stuff We always had done that Throughout my playing career. I always had food because being from Louisiana with all of that good food You know everybody talked and hears about the gumbos and the a2 phase and the you know The crawfish and everything else that we have that we noted for I make sure I bring a little bit of Louisiana with me, okay When people talk about crawfish a lot of times they're talking about the ball crawfish because that's what you see You know the trays that are thrown on the table and the crawfish flying all over the place. That's just boiled crawfish To be able to do that. You're talking about getting hundreds of pounds Or you're talking about sacks of crawfish and then you boil them yourself What's the largest amount of crawfish that you've had at one time that you've prepared yourself? We have a boiler that has you can hold a hundred pounds Okay, so like a you know and most of the time you do this You it's just for your family or friends if we had it like for the Super Bowl say say live crawfish would be coming out The same time as the Super Bowl. Okay. Well, we're gonna wash the Super Bowl. Let's have a big crawfish ball So you get 200 pounds you get six seven eight sacks of crawfish And then what you do is you ball a hundred pounds at a time because a hundred pounds is gonna feed 20 people Okay, so what you do is you throw all of that on the table But as soon as you throw it on the table you start cooking the other hundred pounds So by the time people are finished eating a hundred pounds. You got another hundred pounds to throw so Crawfish are I would say fairly easy to eat. I mean definitely tough to clean. They'll be easy and I clean them quick I you might not deal with you know You know, it took me a while when I tried yeah, you know, you grab the whole crawfish you take it You've been the tail out you pop the tail off and you know, you can suck the head if you want You know people suck the head, you know, it's one of the rituals. They suck the head You throw the top half away you take the tail you tear off the end of the tail And if you do it right usually When you tear the tail off and you pull the tail apart it usually takes out the intestine the vein Yes, okay, so you take that out then you fold it over and you pinch it and it cracks the Tail shell and then you just split it open you pop it in your mouth and you go into the neck. How about frogs? Oh, yeah, I know I'm being fast. Can you catch a frog? Oh, yeah I'm done. Yeah, you go out at night with a with a spotlight the guy drives a boat you get in the front and You have a spotlight on you here. Now. It's a powerful light. It's not just like a little Flashlight that has a 10 watt beam. You're talking about a light That probably is a thousand candle or two three four thousand watt candle light So when you hit a frog it freezes, I mean, you know, it's it's blinded by the glare Because they most of the time they sit like on a lily pad on the on the sawgrass on the rosy weed on the matted grass in Ponds in in marshes in bayous They'll be sitting on the side somewhere So you go at night and the guy drives a boat and if you see one you just hit that frog with that light And he just freezes and as the boat passes you you just grab it Yeah by your hand, I'd be a little bit careful though, you know, you got to know the eye with That we always tell everybody else, you know, alligators have a certain width between the eyes You know, water moxons have a certain width between the eyes frogs have a certain width So if you learn the width of the eyes you got you get a good idea of what is what this is so awesome Yeah, but when you talk about it, I'll I'll scare more guys than anything else because I mean, you know Look everybody, you know, everybody gets concerned about oh you you know in the marsh in the swamp, you know I've gone out and caught 50 a hundred. Well, I got enough after that I mean don't forget somebody's got to clean all right and catching them is very easy Cleaning them is not so fun. And then of course the cooking part. Yeah, not that's what when you're cooking and eating You're not worried about the catching and cleaning Like I'm sure you heard the stories about when I bring the frog legs here. Yes, there are guys here that just go Crazy over the frog legs and that's an experience for them that you provide for them Yeah, that they can't get anywhere else. So that you're doing something special for them Yeah, my dad used to come to Arlington When we play the Rangers and he'd bring like 300 Frog legs and we had a place at a hotel The management at the hotel used to give us tables chairs a security guard and and they put us under this big old tree And my dad would fry all those frog legs up and we they had 15 guys there from the team Eating frog legs and it carried over, you know as time passed a lot of guys weren't there anymore You know my teammates, but new teammates came and new teammates heard the stories wanted to try them So we were still cooking hundreds of frog legs for the guys that were there You know to make a friend from California or Washington or Utah or Delaware or Maine I know that they don't have frogs up there. Okay, but to watch these guys tear into some fried frog legs was Hysterical, yeah, they'd actually coral over the frog legs and over the last several years You've had a lot of them who have retired like Posada and Rivera and Sabathia out of all the past teammate say you've had or even maybe somebody right now Which of the guys has eaten the most frog legs in one sitting goose goose. Okay, goose Do not stick your hand in front of goose If they have frog legs on the table How many can he take down? I never counted but he'll eat more than anybody Oh, yeah, he'll eat more than anybody I'm gonna guess what type of car that you probably drove But I'm gonna say I picture you driving like a pickup truck Flatbed or some in the back. Well, we had a station wagon. All right When I was small, yeah, it's kind of like that. My dad had a station wagon Was it one of those station wagons where it had a third-row seat? Yeah You're kind of looking at that you sit back and you can sit in the back and we had no air condition You had to open up the back glass and you you put down the windows on the side And you travel 60 miles an hour. You feel like you win a wind tunnel. That was great. Oh, yeah, that was air condition How older are you and what made you want to learn to play the drums? Because you've played with the Beach Boys before so obviously you you've gotten pretty good over the years I learned how to play when I was in a teenager a bunch of the guys around the neighborhood that played You know, we we had a little band so we'd start playing on and in certain Times like on the weekend and you'd make a few dollars Mm-hmm and as you grow older you start doing the same thing in the mind leagues I never did anything with but like when we moved to Yankee Stadium I was talking to Jimmy Esposito who was our head groundskeeper at the time So one afternoon Jimmy was unloading all of these carts of the giveaway stuff and when I passed him I looked in and this this was a huge room at the stadium So I just walked in there. I was talking to the guys moving the stuff. I even asked him if they wanted some help No, no, no, so As I as I walked around I noticed that you know Like the room itself went far in the back and then I could see some more room on the left It started to go into my head. That'd be a perfect place for me to get My drum set over here playing the drum keeps your wrist very strong I could work out with my wrist and it's one of the things that people don't know Why I was so successful in throwing sliders because as hard as I snapped my wrist it would they were always strong enough I don't know if I wouldn't have played if it would have been as good as it was without working out with them Because I could play every day and go out and pitch and it never bothered it. Just exercise. There's nothing there There's you know The wrist is a is a place that hardly anything ever happens to no You might get the arthritis when you're 60 70 years old, but you're done by then you don't get So but it did what it was supposed to for the time that I was there for me as a pitcher who snaps off You know, it that was right up my alley, but anyway, I Started thinking about getting my drums and then I decided well, you know what? I'm gonna talk to Bonnie. I'm gonna ask her if I can spin a little money And I'm gonna buy me a new set up here to where I don't have to worry about So I talked to her and she said sure, you know, dude. Yeah, that's what you'd like We're all enough to the field right now. Does this ever get old? Because when you drive up here you start remembering the things that are really fun and The thing is it, you know the game itself is fun, but it's the camaraderie of the guys that you meet all the friendships that you make And you're able to pick them up again because the old stories start coming out again the time that you spend here The learning that the teaching that you you know the teaching that you can give the learning that you still receive Because things change all the time So, you know, like to stay on top of what's going on today. There's so much more Knowledge that's here today than what we had but it's fun to listen and you know now you can acquire it You can pass it on and you don't feel like a Like a tortoise if they ask you a question and it's about today Okay, they'll ask you questions about what you did, but we didn't have all of this You know stuff that they have today But if you're paying attention in the meetings and you watching them work if a young kid ask you about them You can relate to them. You're not going like, oh, let me go see. I don't know. Yeah Yeah, well, you don't appear to be an idiot What is this guy? No, this guy is too old, you know, that's the kind of stuff But like I said, it's the it's like us. We're laughing It's the camaraderie that goes on, you know, like that sign says right there. It says Yankees It doesn't get any better. It's a that that has more clout than Most other scientists Well, the thing that I love most about you and I appreciate your time is is one thing that you said that really sticks out is respect You give it And that's how you earn it And and I hope everybody at home who's watching this I hope so too valuable lesson and applies it because That is how you gain that respect that you have right now The reason why you're still here today I hope so because if somebody ever meets my mom or my dad and they tell him that oh, your son is disrespectful I can still hear that china ball tree and when mom wanted to Tanned my behind because I did something wrong and I'm still afraid. I'm more afraid of my mom today than my dad Because mom used to get that stick and and you knew you were going to get a whooping But you could hear that stick as you were approaching the house. Come here, Raleigh You can hear that stick because if you're disrespectful down there, that's uh, that's something that it They don't want to hear your parents don't want to hear you're disrespectful to anyone Awesome ron. Hey, thank you so much for your time gators. Okay guys have fun day at the ballpark here at I hope we did good I don't know if they see this anymore, but hum boy hum babe. Let's get them