Former Atlanta Braves second baseman Glenn Hubbard was a fiery, hard-nosed type of player. But when it came to a relationship with Jesus Christ, it was the girl who would become his wife who played a leading role. Fun, insightful conversation with "Hubby," including a lot on the magical 1982 Braves season. Also the interview on this week's sports/faith show.
The Dan Scott Show Podcast
Dan Scott Show, Radio Episode 98 - Glenn Hubbard (11-24-24)
The following program is a presentation of Grand Slam Ministries. 2 episode 98 of The Dan Scott Show. I am Dan. Each and every one of them has been presented by our 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Grand Slam Ministries. Hope and pray that everything is going well with you as we get things rolling this week on all of our affiliates, wherever you may be listening to us on Saturday or Sunday, nationally or internationally, live or via the archive. We are just so blessed to have you with us and hope and pray that everything has been going well for you this week. The week before Thanksgiving and the year of 2024 is rapidly coming to a close and we're just trying to keep up. That's all that we can do here is do our best to keep up. We're going to do things a little different today from the standpoint that our interview is so long that I don't believe we're going to have time to take a break and come back and then take another break and come back. So it may be just one long continuous show, but I get to do two things that I love to do, talk baseball and Jesus in the same conversation with former Atlanta Braves and Oakland Athletics Second Baseman, Glenn Hubbard. I met Glenn at Daryl Cheney's charity golf tournament back in April of this year and made contact with him then about coming on the show and he agreed to do so. And then of course we had some things happen in our lives personally here, most notably my father passing away and just kind of threw us off schedule a little bit and then Glenn himself had some health issues that he is still working through, but thankfully everything seems to be going well for him. So finally, just last week we were able to get together and boy, what a conversation we had. Even if you're not a baseball fan, I think you're going to like hearing what Glenn Hubbard has to say about his career, about his faith and how those things intertwine. So we're going to jump right into it right now, my conversation with Glenn Hubbard and we open as we normally do with him telling us what his life is like right now. As we speak, I'm retired and I'm enjoying life and enjoying my time with my wife finally. I've always been gone with baseball when it's been tough, but it's been good. It's interesting. I have talked to a number of former players doing this show and Darryl Cheney's golf tournament is how you and I hooked up and set the wheels for this emotion. I've talked to him and I've talked to Doug Flynn and there's a, seems like a small group of former players who have been able to keep their marriages together, or at least in the old days, they always talked about a baseball marriage and when the player retired, seemingly there were a lot of divorces. How were you able to avoid that? I've heard that well. A lot of those come apart because they don't have as the center of their marriage, Christ. And my wife and kids knew that baseball was what I did, not who I was, but what I did. God gave me the ability to play baseball and it was a job, and not really a job because I enjoyed it all these years. I mean, that was 48 years in baseball, but I think the missing ingredient in a lot of those baseball marriages were Christ. How prevalent was the Christian baseball player during your career, 78 to 89, I believe you were active between the Braves and the A's? How prevalent? As a player. Yeah, right. Well, you know what, in baseball, baseball has a thing called baseball chapel, right? Because really, as a player on Sundays, you're playing. You don't have Sundays off, like, you know, a normal nine to five job, you're off on the weekends. Well, in baseball, you're not. So you got baseball chapel where they bring in people and they share the gospel, share messages for players and it was attended pretty regular by half the team, you know, and there was a few guys that would not come, but more often than not, guys attended. So, you know, after the game, I tried to rush and get to Sunday night service and because I never. It was kind of funny. I used to tell my pastor that during the winter, I was like a missionary home on furlough. I'd look around and I'd say, wow, that's a new member. I don't know that person over there, but, you know, they did have baseball chapel and they still do have baseball chapel. Yeah, I'm the play by play voice for the Red Sox high class A team here in Greenville, South Carolina. And even at the minor league level, they do baseball chapel every Sunday and even bring in someone specifically for the Latin American players who don't speak English or at least don't speak it well. They'll bring in somebody. Do you know what I found out? What I found out later as a coach, whenever there was a Latin chapel guy to that the Latin guy showed up. If there was just an English speaking chapel guy, a lot of the Latin guys wouldn't show up. Some of them would, but most of them wouldn't. So, it was definitely needed to have a Latin speaking chapel guy visiting with former, in this part of the country, remembered mostly for his stint with the Atlanta Braves, second baseman Glenn Hubbard also played for the Oakland Athletics coach for many, many years. You said, what, 48 years in professional baseball? Yeah, since I was 17 and I was with the Braves, Oakland A's, and I finished my coaching career with the Ken City Royals. Right. So, wanna talk about your faith journey, we'll get to that in a moment, but let's talk about your baseball journey. At what point as a child did you begin to fall in love with the game? Well, early on, I started my little career in Tynan, Taiwan, as an eight-year-old, and just really loved it, was fairly good at it, and my dad just always pushed me in that direction. I just always, I didn't really start thinking that it was a, you know, it was always a dream to play, but I didn't really start thinking about it until I was in high school, and, you know, a scholarship would come around and be looking at you, and so that's really when I thought, well, maybe I might get a chance to get drafted. So, you say you started in Taiwan, your dad was in the Air Force, right? He was in the Air Force 20 years. So you bounced around a lot? It was that, you know, when I looked back on it, it was a great experience being able to go to all those different places, but as a kid, every four years you make new friends and you're gone, and you leave them, then you have to make more new friends, and that's probably why I'm more of an introvert than an outgoing person, because I was just always, you're going into a new school system, trying to learn new people, and it was tough as the kid. In some way, though, did that prepare you for life in professional baseball because of the way players come and go, and it's hard to develop a lot of lasting relationships? Well, you know, the first part of my career before free, you know, free agency wasn't really big, and so most of the guys stayed with the team, you know, and so you made those relationships, and I remember when my roommate Larry McWilliams, he left and went to Pittsburgh, and that was a crushing blow to me because he was my best friend in baseball. At what point you talked about when you were in high school thinking you might get drafted at what point as a young player growing up, whether it was Little League, high school, whatever it was, did you realize or start to think, "Hey, maybe I might be pretty good at this game?" Well, I don't like to talk about myself, but I always made all-star teams, and you know, as a senior in high school, I've made the North-South All-Star team, and I was MVP of that game, but still you don't realize until the draft, and somebody says, "Hey, we drafted you. Do you really think?" You know, I mean, I got a lot of college offers, but you know, when they called and said you're drafted by the Atlanta Braves, I wanted to play. Did you have a favorite major league team growing up? Yeah, the Oakland A's, actually. I was a shortstop in high school, all the way through Little League and high school. I was a shortstop, and I love Burke Campaneras, and he was a smaller guy and just loved the way he played, kind of really liked it. So it had to be a thrill for you in a sense, I guess, to get to finish your major league careers a player with Oakland as well. It went full circle as a player, you know, to be able to go there and play in a World Series game against the Dodgers, and you know, when you're a Little League player, that's what you're playing for. You want to win a Little League championship, you want to win all those things. You want to win a high school championship, but you're playing to be in a World Series game. Bad part about it. We didn't beat the Dodgers that year. That was the year of Kurt Gibson hitting the whole run, and I was just stuck in base and I wanted to trip him when he came by me, you know, because we had that game in hand, and Dennis Eckerfley, he was lights out that year, just happened to throw a pitch that Gibson got a good part of the bat on it, a game, a game we went in and walked off on run. Was there any sense looking back at it now that, I don't know if happy is the right word, but there's a little bit of pride that you were at least on the field for one of the most iconic moments in baseball, or can you not allow yourself to even think that all the years later? No, I think it was the most crushing loss of my life. Really? Yeah, and you know, you think back on it, what a great moment for him, and I think he's got, he's got some kind of dementia or Alzheimer's or not something like that, and so, but what a great moment for him to be able to, he couldn't even walk to the plate hardly, he had two bad hamstrings, and he ends up getting a run around the base and off his fist, and but for me, I still look at it and I drop my head and I say, dang. And he wanted to trip him, I love the candor we're visiting with Glenn Hubbard. You remember September 23rd, 1978? According to the records, that's when you hit your first major league home run. Off of many start me into, probably, I get two home runs that year, I know I ran around the base, it was against the Reds, and Pete Rose was that third, and I went by him and he was just smiling, because I was sprinting around the base, I wasn't jogging. At what, at what juncture in 1978 did you get called up? It was the middle of the year, I believe. Okay, so were you there when Gene Garber put an end to Rose's 44 game? Yes, I was not playing second base that night, I had an injury that year, but you know, I remember after the game, Pete Rose, they asked him a question and he says, "Garber was pitching like it was the seventh game of the World Series out there," and to which Garber replied, "Well, he was hitting like it was the seventh game of the World Series," and 44 game hit the street. I mean, I think Pete probably played every game like it was the seventh game of the World Series. I used to hang his picture in my locker when I was in the minor leagues, because my dad always taught me, "You got two and a half, three hours to play the game of baseball, you might as well go all out," Pete Rose did. Yeah, and that's the paradox of the person that Pete was, and we don't want to go down that road too much, but for all of the issues he had in his personal life off the field, there's no greater example of how to play the game of baseball the right way than Pete Rose. Well, he gave it all every day, it's 4,200 hits, that's 21 years of 200 hits, and the greatest hitsleader ever, and it had never happened again. Well, I don't think players will play that long, you know? No, I agree with you. 1982 for Braves fans is always going to be a special year, because they kind of came out of nowhere, it had been a really bad team for a long time, and then had that special year with Joe Torrey managing, and Bob Gibson was the pitching coach, and to when Del Murphy kind of exploded onto the scene, and the nation began to realize what kind of a great player he was. Was there an inclination at all in spring training that things might be coming together for this team? I don't think Joe Torrey in spring training talked about anything other than winning, and I think we led the Grapefruit League in wins that year, so we came out of spring training, I think we were 16 and 8 maybe down there, and so we were playing good baseball, and then we lost, I mean we won 13 in a row to start the season, and so that's what we needed, and it was kind of funny at the middle of the season, we lost 19 of 21, it was terrible, and then at the end of the year we won 7 out of 10 on the road to kind of get into it. So it was a great year. The 13 in a row, I remember because you set the record against my Reds. Yeah, well, hey, when I first came up the big red machine was unbelievable. I mean you had Rose, Concepcion, Morgan, Perez, Bench, Foster, Griffey and Geronimo, and that's just the players, they had good pitch in there too, so I mean you knew they were going to roll into town, and it was going to be a battle. Yeah, they didn't call them the grade 8 for nothing, for sure. What made things come together, you know, sometimes we hear the word "chemistry" thrown around, and I think sometimes it means something sometimes it doesn't, but what was the emulsifier that brought that team together allows you to get off to such a great start? Like I said, Joe Torrey constantly talks about winning games in spring training instead of getting ready for the season. So for us to get some wins under a belt there, we got confidence in who we were, and then to start off 13-0, you know, you thought you were never going to lose, and they say "chemistry," but when you win, that really is a pretty good chemistry. I mean there's been some teams that fought it in the locker room, didn't have that good chemistry in locker room, but they were still good. Yeah, your Oakland A's in 72, 3, and 4 would be the prime sample of that. Yeah, and so, you know, I mean, a lot of people say, you just win. When you win everything else, you just put on the sideburners. Right. Right. Visiting with Glenn Hubbard on this week's edition of the show, we'll leave baseball here for just a moment and come back to it, but I want to talk about your faith journey. First of all, did you grow up in a Christian home? Well, we were always in church for the most part. I was a Mormon, and so I always knew about being a good person. My mom, until I got old enough, and my dad took me hunting on Sundays. So I mean I was kind of, was always in church, and then all of a sudden I was out of church and hunting, but I always was taught about Christ, but not really that you had to have a personal relationship with Christ. That wasn't until I was in a ball where my friends, we used to play cards after the game and they kept telling me I needed a relationship with Jesus Christ. And I was like, you know, inside, I'm thinking, I'm hit 385 here in low a ball. I mean, everything's good. And then halfway through this season, I got brought up to double a, where I got off to a good start, and then I struggled. And after this season in double A, the A ball team was in a playoff. So I went back there from Savannah to Greenwood, South Carolina. And after one of the games, a young lady invited me home. Well, as a man, I thought it was for other reasons. And we got in her house and she said, I'm going to go into the back room and slip into something comfortable. So of course you know what I'm thinking. She comes out with, I should have known, she gave me some grape juice to drink instead of offering liquor or anything like that. So she comes out, she uses some genes and stuff, and she came out with the Bible in her hand and told me I needed a personal relationship with Christ. And so, you know, my roommates and my player friends kind of planted the seed and she watered it. No, you know, through that relationship with her, I accepted Christ into my life on a beach and service out of Florida. And it ended up marrying her and I'm still married to her. Imagine that. Imagine that. Isn't it funny how God works sometimes? It is, and you know, if that story goes back a year before, I got married after my first year in Pro Ball, I went home, got married to a high school sweetheart. And then a year later she told me she wanted a divorce. And so that winter in Utah, I was drinking, doing stuff and I was driving up this little, in Utah there's a reservoir, a pine view reservoir up in the mountains. And I was driving there, I was going to drive off into the reservoir, something not a visible voice, don't do it, there's something in baseball. So I worked out really hard that year and I used to tie a rope around my neck and whenever I got, it sounds crazy, I don't recommend it to any young kids out there. But whenever I felt like giving up, I would just pull on it, you know, pull on that rope around my neck. But that very next season after that happened, is when this young lady and my roommates started talking to me about Christ and I ended up, and that's something in baseball which I thought was fame, money, it wasn't that, it was Christ. Was your career moved on, is it safe to assume that that gave you a grounding that enabled you to withstand the highs and the lows and the difficulties that come with really any job, any profession, but particularly life on the road is a major league baseball player? Yes, baseball is tough, it's tough on the women. You got to have a solid young lady that she's got to become independent because kids get sick, you're on the road and you know, enjoy playing baseball, she's got to handle all the problems. So it was tough but at the same time during the winter, you're home every day and I learned early on in my life and my married life that the winter time was for my wife and kids. I love to play golf but during the winter time, it was her. I didn't try to do things without her and the kids. I want to go back to something you said a moment ago that when you were growing up and you're going to church, you were going to Mormon Church and you said there was no real emphasis on a relationship with Jesus Christ. What denomination would you call yourself now? I'm an independent Baptist but I think if you go to church, you ought to be going to a church where the pastor is preaching the word. If he's not preaching the Bible and being saved through Jesus Christ, you need to leave and go to a church that, and I think there's like in this area in Atlanta, I go to a church that's out in Loganville but there's plenty of good churches that you can go to. You've just got to go there and listen to the pastor. If you know the word, you'll know whether he's preaching the word of God. Oh, absolutely. And some of the things that we hear from some churches today where you can go and the pastor never opens the Bible. He gives an inspirational self-help talk as opposed to preaching the word. That's why I'm so thankful for the way I was brought up with a dad who was a pastor and a preacher for 54 years and we go to a Bible believing church where the pastor preaches out of the word every single week. But the reason I brought up the Mormon thing again was I'm just wondering if when you became a Christian, if that caused you any issues with your family? To start with, yes, but they've never ostracized, they never picked me out or anything like that. They know my faith. They know that I believe, they believe that Christ died on the cross, but for whatever reason, they believe there's something else. You add to it, you got to be a good person. Well, I believe once you accept Christ in your life, the works have come through, but you can't work your way to heaven. If you do that, why did Christ die on the cross? And he said it's finished. He paid the price. For by grace are you saved through faith and that not of yourselves that is a gift of God and not of works lest any man should boast. Christ is exactly right. And it says, who's the whoever? You know, there's a lot of denominations that they think they're the only denomination going to be there. Well, they're going to be also surprised because it's not about a denomination or anything like that. It's about Christ. Well, it brings to mind an old joke. You know, I grew up in a free will Baptist church and I go to a southern Baptist church now. Right. And there's the old joke about and maybe it was a Pentecostal who died and went to heaven and St. Peter was showing them around and they went by this one room and he said, be very quiet and they tiptoed past it and then got beyond it. And the Pentecostal said, what is that? He said, oh, that's the Baptist. They think they're the only ones here. Yeah. So well, who's the whoever? Whosoever. Exactly. It means I don't care what you are. That's why, you know, when all the, you know, the thing with these lives matter, this lives matter, we all matter at the foot of the cross. We're all the same. I don't care who you are, we're a center say by grace at the foot of the cross, we're brothers. Amen. If you accept Christ into your life, I can be your brother, I can go out to dinner with you. I've never met you, but I can go out to dinner with you. So, you know, I mean, now I might not talk because I'm a little more reserved. I have to get to know somebody before I, I don't know, Glenn. I was just sitting here thinking as a, as a preacher's son, you were kind of, you were kind of bringing the word there. I was ready to start passing the plate to take up a collection. Well, you know, it was tough. The first pastor I sat under, he would, he would in the middle of church, brother hub. I'm going down to Trinity Baptist in Jacksonville. I'm going to be preaching where you go with me and share a testimony and I'm like, you know, right, right in the middle of the service. What am I supposed to do? Say no. Right. And you know, I'm, I'm, I sit in the back because if I sit up front, I feel like people are looking at me and so it was tough, but you know, it says be ready to give an answer. Right. And, and it really, you don't have to, I mean, I've, I've been invited to preach services to take up the whole. So I can't do that. I can share a testimony. I can share my testimony about how my wife invited me into her home, how my friends sitting around a card table said I needed Christ, but I can't take over a service. So, you know, it was tough to reckon, you know, that and try it. I get asked a lot to go come share testimonies and it's tough. I mean, it's tough for me. I didn't like getting up front and when I was in school, if you had to do an oral book report and you can give me an F, I'll, I'll make it up on a written report, you know, I just didn't like to do that and it all goes back to moving every four years. I think you don't want to think back on it. That might be now to play in front of 40,000 people. I can do that in a minute. Didn't bother me, probably because you're focusing your concentration. You don't hear that right around you. You don't hear 40,000 people yelling. You see the pitch, you see the, you know, that focus is here. So, you know, when I retired, it was kind of life changing. It was exciting for me. I went to a game, the Braves, you know, when I, when Bobby retired, the Braves for a minute kind of kicked me out of the family, you know, they, they said they were going a different direction. And I said, well, what about a minor league job? And they said, we got no room for you. I said, really? Thirty-three years? Well, anyway, I went to the Royals. I ended up retiring and now that I'm retired, they called and said tickets are available. You want to do anything for us, you know, whatever. And so I went to a game and I'm sitting up in the stands with a guy named Brad Cochran and his son and one of his friends and I'm sitting there and I'm looking at the shortstop. He's about to pick our guy off and it happens and I'm yelling back and my friends was kind of hard to get it out of your system. And then I said, yeah, it is. And after that game, leaving the ballpark, I, we parked over at Dale Murphy's restaurant and we ended up winning the game and walking with the fans, it was so unbelievable to me. So exciting to be a part of the Braves nation, to be a fan because I never heard that. You know, when you're a player or a coach, you shake hands on the field and you go down and you go up and you get dressed, you don't see all that. And it was exciting to be, to go from a player coach to being a fan now, being a part of that excitement. Having said that though, I deal with a lot of coaches in my job as a NCAA division one broadcaster and a minor league baseball broadcaster. And I'll ask our football coach, Clay Hendricks, at Fermi University, for instance, when we have our bye week, what'd you do? Well, I watch football, you know, I did some stuff with my family, but I watched some football over the weekend and I always ask, can you watch it as a fan? Or do you watch it as a coach, whether you can help it or not? Are you processing, okay, this guy's doing this and maybe we can still this and was it the same or is it the same for you? Can you watch it as a fan or do you watch it as a former player or as a player? Now, I watch it as a, well, as a coach, mostly now, when I see a blue pit and a brave player takes it, gets a double on it, a hustle, a hustle double, it's not really a double, but he was hustling and he got a double. I applaud that. And when there's a guy at first, I'm looking at the pitcher, whether he's going to pick off or the guy gets on second, like I said, I was yelling back. So even on TV, I still watch it as a coach, but being there at the ballpark and being with all that excitement, I became a fan. It was exciting for me because I'd never had that excitement, that kind of excitement. So what's your opinion about the state of the game today? I'm sure you get asked this a lot. You know, I mean, it is what it is. It's been transformed by, you know, I look at the hitter. They couldn't, I don't want to say they couldn't play back when I played, but they have bruises back in my, you know, you stand at you stand at the plate and admire a home run. You don't think Nolan Ryan's going to hit you in the ribs. You don't think these pitchers are going to throw over your, they didn't, they didn't really throw, they throw right at your head and knock you down. And now, you know, they do all the show boating and stuff. So, you know, the game's changed and everybody show boats, the pitchers celebrate when they strike a guy out, so it's, you know, it's even Steven on that, but, you know, all the analytics that have come in the game and, you know, I was told that RBIs aren't really a stat now. And I'm like, wait a minute, the Hall of Fame is filled up with guys that drove runs in. Right. You're not going to just fill up a guy that hit 300. That's not filled up with guys that hit 200 and drove in 60 runs. You had to drive in 100 runs, you had to hit 300 and 30 home runs was okay, you know, and so the game's changed that way, but it's still baseball and, you know, I still love it. Oh, it is what it is. Yeah. Our, our manager, who I believe is coming back again at the high A level, he's 43 years old in the Red Sox organization, but he has what I would call an old soul. And some of the things that we talk about when the tape recorder is not on, drives us both crazy, because, you know, I'm seeing guys at the high A level who are coming out of power five conferences and, you know, NCAA baseball, who don't know what base to throw to. They don't know how to tag up in advance. Just some of the basic fundamentals of the game are going by the way, I'm going by the wayside and Glenn, I can tell you firsthand experience, they're not working on them in the minor leagues. No, no, no, no, well, my last year with the Royals, bring training. All right. Mm hmm. My life. I'm an infield guy. As an organization, we did not take one infield my last year with the Royals. We didn't take one infield. Wow. Yeah. Now we did some early work and we did stuff like that, but we, there's something about infield and I used to think infield was over ready because when I, when I played you had to take, they took infield every day. Right. I mean, it was every day and there was days where my arm hurt, but I had to take infield. But they don't work on the defense part of the game. They don't work. You can lead off with the double, they try to drive men and you end up hitting three fly balls, you know, to the left side. If you'd have just pushed the ball to the right, he'd have been on the third and then a fly ball, you get him in, but they don't, they don't want the kids to do that. No. You know what I found interesting, um, up until I think it was through the 2019 season, because I have access to the, the major league baseball stat portal through what we do. Right. That's where all the minor league stats are as well. Up until through through the 2019 season, there was a stat for the percentage of time that a team and individual players got a runner in from third with less than two outs. That's right. And in 2021, that stat went away. It's no longer on the portal on the, uh, the stat program. All you need is a ground ball early in the game, infield, infield plays back. Okay. Yep. They'll sit there and they'll take, they'll swing in a pitch and then they'll take two fast balls down the middle and walk back to the floor, back to the dugout, well, you know, wait a minute. And you lose by one run. How many games are lost by one run? And all you had to do was hit a ground ball, hit a ground ball. I oversimplified that, but hit a ground ball. Don't strike out. Don't take too fast balls. What do you look, you got to be able to hit a fast ball. Yeah. Well, the thing that drives me crazy is the lack of adjustment with two strikes. Right. There's, there's no, there's no swing adjustment with two strikes. In other words, guys are going up and they're taking their three launch angle swings and if they hit it fine and if they don't hit it, oh, well, the next guy might. Right. And the launch angle, that was the worst thing that ever came into baseball. I mean, but, you know, it, like I said, it is what it is and that's the way the games played now. And it's disappointing to old school guys, just like that manager in Greenville, he might be old school and he probably longs to be able to play that game, but he's told, right, don't do that. You're exactly right. Now, now in baseball, if you still 60 bags, well, it used to be a hundred bags, a hundred bags was a Ricky Henderson, Vince Coleman, Tim Rains, those were, oh, now it's, you still 50 bags, man. You're something special. No, you're not. There's certain levels. I was told to hit 300. Now I was a 250 hitter. I struggle as a hitter in the big leagues, but I was taught 300. You drive in a hundred. You've done something, you score a hundred runs, you've done something, certain amount of bags, you know, I mean, it was just like that and you had to catch the ball. When the Braves were going through all those 14 straight championships, it was pitching, right? And something else, defense, right? They go together, well, look at the Yankees, three errors in one inning, fly ball, ball to the shortstop's right, which is easier. If you'd been going left and had to throw to the third, a little tougher play, he's going to his right, throws it in a dirt, and then a play that they work on, pitchers work on more than anything, PFP cover first, you know, now I used to tell my first baseman, listen, you're going to catch that ball in such a way. When you catch it, you start going toward first because that pitcher may not be there. And that was a play that if he doesn't lay back on, he just, it was an easy ground ball, just kind of laid back. If he had to come and got it, he could have ran and beat him to first. Any of those three plays that are made, you think you had a better chance of winning, right? Probably changes the outcome of that game anyway. Yeah, of that game, and then they got to win in that play, but it's pitching and defense. Now let's bang him, let's just try to outscore him. Well, that doesn't work. You know, I'm starting to get the idea, though, that maybe some of this is being tempered a little bit, that I think the game like life is cyclical to a certain degree. And for instance, since I'm a lifelong Reds fan, they hire Terry Francona. And then suddenly the next thing you hear is the organization saying, we want to start making more contact, we want to start hitting line drives and striking out less because in our ballpark, line drives will get, you know, we'll get out of here. And I'm thinking, well, welcome to Hank Aaron. Welcome to Willie Mays. Welcome to all of these guys who had the flat swing, the low finish and hit 600 and 700 home runs. Yep. You know, you look at those guys stats, not only were they 300 hitters, they drove in, you look at Hank Aaron or Frank Robison's stats. He had 130, 140, 125 RBIs every year, and it was unbelievable, those stats. But the reason they were getting them, not only they hit some home runs, they just strike out much. Right. You look at the power hitters of yesterday year with the exception of maybe Reggie Jackson, he struck out, you know, do or die, but there's a lot of hitters that didn't, for what you want to say about Barry Bonds, I was looking at a stat the other night. The year he, he had 215 walks, a hundred walks were a, we're just going to walk. Intentional. Yeah. And he struck out like 40 times on the year, 40. And he's a power hitter, you know, they walked him with bases loaded. Mm hmm. I'm going to give you one run, but you're not going to get two or three by getting a palm. Yeah. No. Yeah. Because Buck Showalter had did that to him a couple of times for whatever you want to think about Barry and whatever, you know, he won a couple of MVPs before he, yeah. That's the, that's, that's the shame to me. He was already going to be a Hall of Famer before. That's right. So if you look at Mark McGuire, he had 48 home runs as a rookie, he was, he was skinny. Yeah. You know, and when I played with him, he weighed, I think it was two, 18, two, 20, and he ended up his last year, it was two, 60. Yeah. So when I first, when I first came up, weightlifting was like taboo. You can't do that. You're going to get too bulky. You can't hit. And then along came for the Braves, Ronnie Gatt, he came spring training. He was huge, 30, 30, right, you know, so baseball's changed that way. And now they've kind of gone back the other way and it's more of a position specific weightlifting. If you're a catcher, corner guy, you're going to lift a certain way and they've done it so much. Well, every team's got a, a weightlifting guy. Right. It's a great thing. Every, every team. I had Greenville. What is this? It's a Greenville drive, right? Yes, sir. That's a beautiful ballpark in the downtown area. My wife's from Greenwood, South Carolina. And that downtown area for Greenville is, they really did that up nice. I mean, I used to love to go into there. Well, you're going to have to come see us sometime and Atlanta's not that far. I know it's close. My sister-in-law lives this side of Greenville coming from Atlanta, so. Nice. I have learned something about you, Glenn Hubbard. If I can put on my amateur psychologist hat here, you're correct. You don't like talking about yourself very much, but when I got you talking about Jesus and talking about the game of baseball, all of a sudden you opened up. Well, I'm passionate about both. Baseball was just a gift. And I learned that early on that I was given a gift to be able to play baseball. And it's worked hard at it. Don't get me wrong. I think if a kid has ties, I've seen a lot of kids as a coach that had talent, but they weren't willing to work and get better. And that's part of the problem of the minor leagues. All these kids dominate, whether it's out of high school, college that dominate. Then when you get into pro ball, that left fielder was dominant in California. That guy was dominant in New York, Arkansas dominant. Now if you don't work, you fall by the wayside. You really do. And so hard work works, you know, and that's the part that I'm glad I got out when I did two years ago. And I was told that, well, we can't work the guys today, it's too hot out. And I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, these kids have picked a profession where they're going to be outside their whole life. Right. They better get used to the warmth because it's hot in Atlanta, it's hot in Boston, it's hot in California. So they better get used to it now as a kid, right, get used to the workload. And then, you know, once you get a routine, then you can just do your routine, whether it's hitting, whether it's ground ball, if you take some, some and then just play some balls off the bat, but you get you find your routine, but you have to find that routine. Absolutely. I just laugh at you telling the kid from the Dominican Republic, it's too hot to work out. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? Well, they, you know, they're the one really. The players that come back and really thank you after. Thank you for the work. Yeah. Thank you for the hard work that you put in as a coach. And I said, no, no, no, no, I was just a vehicle. You showed up. If you wouldn't have showed up, you wouldn't, you know, I tell people, Chipper Jones and Derek Jeter in the, well, the lead is below you. It used to be the Sally League. Chipper Jeter made, I think 58 errors, Chipper Jones made 56. Both of them Hall of Famers, both of them pretty good defensive players in the big leagues. How did they get? How did they do that? Doing a lot of work that nobody ever sees. A lot of work that nobody sees and that's the beauty of going to a ballpark in Greenville and watching the players and you say, man, this guy thinks two years later, you see him in the big leagues and you say, wow, yeah, he's a pretty good player. Yeah. And it's beautiful. I get to the ballpark usually about three o'clock and those guys, they're out there doing their thing and they're working and they're hitting the cage and, and that's right. You know, a lot of people think that they get there 45 minutes before first pitch and no man, they're out there, they're out there working whether you agree sometimes with the kind of work they're doing, talking about analytics versus everything else, but they're out there. Right. They're out there working. Let me ask you this before, before I let you go, I want to be respectful of your time. When we, you take everything into consideration, your, your career, your life, your faith, how do you want people to remember Glenn Hubbard? Well, I was just a guy that had some ability in baseball, but I don't want you to remember me as that. I'm a center saved by grace, first of all, that have some talent with baseball and played the game hard, you know, and that comes from my dad and my mom. That's the way they taught me. You're only going to be out there a couple of hours, give it your all, come off the field, you may not get a hit, but you can make a good defensive play, still save the game. You know, that's the thing that, again, Yankees is perfect, it's perfect. If you make a defensive play, you win the game. Three opportunities to make defensive plays and you win the game. Where you have a better chance to win the game, who's to say something else might not have happened, but, and then you got to win the next day, Billy Buckner. I know you know that, the ball through his legs. People forget there was a game seven. That happened in game six. That's right. Yeah. And you know, and you know what? Usually the manager had taken Billy Buckner out of the game and put in a guy named Stapleton. Right, John McNamara, he wanted him to be out there for the celebration. Well, I bet he relives that, and you know what, it's terrible, Billy Buckner was a phenomenal player. Yes, he was. I'm talking phenomenal and he, he heard his ankle, I think, when he was with the Dodgers and, but still, phenomenal player. Yep. It's one of the many, many things I love about doing this show. You just never know what twist and turns an interview is, is going to take a, you know, none of what I do is scripted. I go into an interview with a knowledge of the person and, you know, some questions in my mind that we're going to, to ask, but I try to play off of what the interviewee is telling me. And that's a lesson for all of you who are in the business or perhaps want to be in the business. If you're going to be an interviewer, you have to listen to what the person is saying instead of your mind focusing on the next question. But Glenn Hubbard, thank you so much for your time. It was a, a wonderful, wonderful interview and one that I think you could probably tell we could have kept going. And because of the length, that's going to do it for this show. You've got a commercial free version of the show, but I will remind you that at Grand Slam Ministries, we need your prayers and we need your support. And I will just ask you to prayerfully consider what God may be asking you to do with a monthly gift or a one time gift to help us out for the long term, but also for the fact that we're coming up on the Christmas season again. And if you remember last year, we found a family in need and we'd like to do that again this year. Unfortunately, it won't be very difficult because there are a lot of families in need. So be thinking about how you can help us and once we get that nailed down, we'll bring you the details. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you again next week for another edition of The Dan Scott Show. Until then, I'm Dan, God bless you, and so long everybody. [music] [music] [MUSIC PLAYING] You