People always ask me how I stay in shape over the winter when I’m home in my country, the Dominican Republic. Do I have a private gym? Do I have personal trainers? Do I practice on a custom-built, state-of-the-art baseball diamond? You certainly could afford all those things, people say to me. But let me tell you my secret. Three days a week during the off-season, I leave my house in the early afternoon to embark on a journey to a special place—the one place where I prepare for the season ahead. On this journey, I take my bats, my Chicago Cubs gear, and everything else I need to practice the craft of hitting, the skill that has brought me so many blessings and made me known to so many wonderful people.

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As a way of saying thank you to all of you who have cheered me and filled my life with so much joy, I write this book and invite you on this journey. It is my hope that when we complete it together, there will be no doubting who I am and what I’m about.

I make this four-hour round trip (I’ll tell you where we are going in a minute) to remind myself of where I came from, of what gives me strength, of what made me who I am. And every time I make it, the journey becomes a kind of celebration—not of home runs or millions of dollars, but of faith.

In fact, my life is a celebration of faith—faith in my abilities as a baseball player when no team wanted me, of my faith in God when my family and I were hungry and penniless. And faith in the most important, most cherished person in my life: my blessed mother, Mireya.

It is her I salute, with a touch to my heart and a kiss blown directly into the television cameras, every time I hit a home run. That simple gesture has become like a trademark for me, something that gets written about a lot in the newspapers and the magazines. In all those articles and on television, I always say, "I love you, Mama."

That love has sustained me all my life, all the way back to the place I return to again and again—first as a barefoot boy, now as a person of privilege. It is a town very familiar to baseball fans: San Pedro de Macorís, a city of hope and 200,000 residents.

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