"He was a nice fellow. There were about eight Americans on the team and he invited us over to his house, which I thought was a very nice gesture – opening his house, making us feel comfortable, talking baseball… And he was very impressive. Not a huge guy, but well-proportioned and obviously very strong. He used a maximum-dimension bat – as big and heavy and long as the rules say a bat can be. Huge. The handle was almost as big as the barrel of the bat. It was around 54 inches in length [sic] and weighed I don’t know how many ounces. One day, he was talking to us about hitting and was handling this bat. The size and shape of it sort of intrigued me; I should have been listening to what he was saying. Might have helped me later. Anyway, he set it down. I went over to pick it up. I couldn’t get it off the floor. Here he was holding it and moving it around like it was nothing and I could barely lift it. That was very impressive to me."