I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.

You always get a special kick on opening day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.

Too many kids today are playing major league ball and don't belong there.

I'd like to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee.

My parents never told me I was beautiful, and for one very good reason. I wasn't. When your child is a tubby, bespectacled little oddity, as I was, it's important not to give them false expectations.

The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother.

So to answer your question, I'm not entirely sure how I ended up where I am today, in the sense that nobody in my family is an actor. It just happened by mistake.

At one point, my house was a school for autistic children. I opened up my doors to about 30 kids and their families at the time. I was turning into Mary Poppins because I had to do something for these kids who have nowhere to go. So my house was the school for two years.