What I see lacking today is the devotion necessary to produce a .400 hitter, and even with all the circumstances in the world going for you, in order to do the toughest thing there is to do in sport -- hit a baseball properly -- a man has got to devote every ounce of his concentration to it. Today that's a hard thing to do. Today ballplayers have a thousand distractions. They're always on the run.

In the old days we didn't fly, we rode the train. We might be ten, twelve hours on a train, and much of the talk was hitting. We didn't have television, we didn't have a lot of money to play around with. We lived in an atmosphere of baseball. We talked it, we experimented, we swapped bats. I was forever trying a new stance, trying to hit like Greenberg or Foxx or somebody, and then going back to my old way. I recommend that to kids. Experiment. Try what you see that looks good on somebody else.

A trip to the plate was an adventure for me, one that I could reflect on and store up information. I honestly believe I can recall everything there was to know about my first 300 home runs -- who the pitcher was, the count, the pitch itself, where the ball landed. I didn't have to keep a written book on pitchers -- I lived a book on pitchers. I was a guy who practiced until the blisters bled, and then practiced some more. When I was a kid I carried my bat to class with me. I'd run a buddy's newspaper route if I could get him to shag flies for me. When I played for the San Diego Padres I paid kids to shag flies on my days off.

Rod Luscomb used to say that in seven years on the playground I never broke a bat hitting a ball incorrectly, that all my bats had the bruises in the same spot, like they were hammered there by a careful carpenter, right on the thick of the hitting surface. That might be an exaggeration, but I believe it is true that when you put in as much time as I did you get results. Certainly from boyhood I was prepared for that kind of dedication, often to the exclusion of all else, and often to the point that the sheer agony of the concentration had side effects that hurt me, even on the verge of that .400 season.

I signed to play in 1940 for $10,000, more than double what I had made my first year. It was to begin a climb that would reach $100,000 by 1950. But I sure didn't know that in 1940.I was a twenty-year-old kid, worried about everything. I remember driving Doc Cramer, our center fielder, down to Kenmore Square one day that year, and Doc said, "You know who the best hitter in the league is right now?" We have been comparing the hitters around. "You are. You're the best."

But 1940 was a tough year for me. I was maturing, to be sure, but I was suffering too. Certainly I was not getting the balls to hit I got in 1939. Jimmy Foxx and Joe Cronin were at an age when they were beginning to fade, and pitchers were pitching around me a little. I wasn't hitting as many home runs in Fenway Park. I had hit fourteen there the year before, a record, and in order to install a bullpen they had moved in the right-field fence to a more accommodating distance (still not a bargain at 380 feet). They anticipated a lot more home runs, and the crowds were getting bigger, coming out to see the fresh kid.

I had been moved to left field because it was easier to play -- right field in Boston is a bitch, the sun field, and few play it well. Jackie Jensen was the best I saw at it. Left field at Fenway Park is shallow, only 315 feet from home plate to the big high wall everybody makes fun of. You don't have to go back much for a ball hit to left, and to left center it's only 370 feet, where a lot of parks might go to 400. It's not a sun field, and in time anybody can learn to play the wall. When you catch onto the caroms you can hold line drives to singles.

Left field is also where the scoreboard is and I got to be buddies with the operator, Bill Daley. He'd give me the word on what was going on around the league, all the scores and everything. When DiMaggio was on his fifty-six-game hitting streak Bill would keep track. He'd tell me, "Joe just got a double," and I'd pass it on to Dom DiMaggio in center field. Anyway, left field would have been fine with me, except for one thing: It put me a little closer to the fans, and they were beginning to get to me that year. I started reacting, mostly out of my own frustration. I'd say things: "Boston's a lousy town." "The salary I get is peanuts," even though as a kid I never dreamed I'd be making so much money. Then the writers started in on me.

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