[Yogi44]

Here are a few quotes from John Smoltz and one from Bruce Benedict on Smoltz's 3000 K milestone. I maintain a website for Mark Patrick (one of the BBTM on XM hosts), so I get these quotes sent to me. Since it was Braves related, I figured I'd share it.

From Joe Castellano on MLB Live Late Edition, interview with Smoltz on 4-22-08 after the game.
John Smoltz on the moment of his 3,000th K
“As much as I tried to continue the streak and obviously limit the team to runs and win another game, the moment built up greater than I could imagine, the crowd every time I got to two strikes, they wanted to see it happen and happen as fast as it could. You realize it’s never happened in the city of Atlanta, I’ve just been honored to do it here at home. I did not want it to happen somewhere else to be honest with you, the stars were aligned.”

John Smoltz on the road to 3000 K’s
“My path has been a crooked one, it’s taken me everywhere you can imagine, a book wouldn’t do it justice, I’ve pitched with so much pain that at times I don’t want to do it anymore but it’s the plight of the pitcher. You deal with the things you can deal with and I never would have dreamed that this day would come especially after going to the closers role but hard work and dedication and just being part of a great organization has allowed me to experience some of this stuff, I’m just a blessed man that if the career ended tomorrow I would be content with everything that went on.”

John Smoltz on the art of the strikeout
“I don’t ever go into a game thinking about how many I’m going to strike out, I certainly would love to have strikeouts with runners on third with less than 2 outs, that’s a time where you know they won’t score but it’s ironic cause I don’t know what the breakdown is but I noticed some of my high strikeout totals, I don’t win the game, and so it’s not a gauge that you’re going to win or you’re on your game, it’s more an indicator of your stuff and the aggressiveness of the hitters.”

John Smoltz on learning to be a better pitcher over the years
“I wasted 3 years of my big league career not knowing what I was doing, no one taught me how to do it, no one taught me how to pitch. I was cursed with the tag of having the best stuff and just go out and throw it, well what I did was I did. I went to 0 and 2 on a lot of hitters, went 3 and 2 and walked a lot of them. I wasted so many pitches because I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t know why they were swinging at it and what I’ve learned over the past couple years, really my last 8 years my strikeout to walk ratio is probably as good as anybody’s because I’ve learned how to pitch, I’ve learned how to be efficient with a Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine like efficiency and I think that has aided to the advice I can give a young player. And it’s pitch recognition. The one thing you have to be able to do is throw your pitches out of the same slot and if you can do that it’s hard to recognize the pitches and that gives me an advantage.”

From Baseball This Morning (4-23-08)
Bruce Benedict, former Braves' catcher, who caught John Smoltz’s first K back in 1988:
“We knew as an organization that we had a great talent there [ in Smoltz]…but it was certainly untapped…What a big venue to pitch in…Shea Stadium and a sold out house, Daryl Strawberry in the Mets’ lineup…. What we tried to do was stay with his basic meat and potatoes stuff …the biggest thing we had going for us that day, was nobody knew anything about John…he had a great fastball and a great curve… we just tried to throw strikes and get ahead and use the fact that they [Mets] didn’t know much about him and it worked out well...Bobby Cox was the general manager at the time, after the game, we won and we walked in [the clubhouse], and he said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘We may have a really good one here,’ that’s an understatement of Biblical proportion there…”