TAMPA — His music career couldn’t be better and, much as he was as a baseball player, Bernie Williams is challenged every day to improve.
Yet there is a piece of Bernie Williams that longs to smell the pine tar on the bat and to stuff his body into pinstripes.
“I miss it a lot,” Williams said during a brief visit to the Yankees’ clubhouse at George M. Steinbrenner Field yesterday. “It’s one of those things . . . you play for a team as long as I did. Of course I miss it.”
Williams misses the game, but he has no problem looking in the mirror about his accomplishments because he did it without performance-enhancing drugs.
“I don’t look at my career any differently,” Williams said when asked about some of his peers using drugs. “I have the satisfaction of knowing that I played in pain and with injuries and never did anything like that. The bottom line is I look in the mirror and I did it the right way. I have no regrets. Everybody has a story. I had a lot of fun and I did it the right way.”
Williams, 41, hasn’t played in the majors since the 2006 season, and while he thinks of himself as a guitar player first, the playing flame hasn’t been totally extinguished.
“Seventy percent musician, 30 percent player,” said Williams, who played for Puerto Rico in last year’s World Baseball Classic. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have feelings for the organization.”
Williams, whose 2,336 hits over 16 seasons in pinstripes ranks fifth on the all-time club list (ahead of Joe DiMaggio, Don Mattingly and Yogi Berra), didn’t have a clean divorce from the team.
Invited to spring training on a minor league contract in 2007, Williams declined. While he hasn’t announced a retirement, he is done.
For many players, the first few years out of the game are difficult. The money isn’t the same, the adulation is gone and there is nothing to fill the competitiveness that consumes athletes.
That hasn’t been Williams’ plight.
“The key is to find something to fill the void, to be the best you can be at something,” Williams said. “I think I have found it in music. I have been getting great reviews and have re-invented myself.”
Williams said he doesn’t compete against other musicians, but there is enough juice in the job to get him through.
“It’s more competing against yourself, doing it day in and day out,” Williams said. “As any professional musician will tell you, you have to go through your exercises and listen to music. It’s a lifelong journey and I am starting to catch up.”
And yet the big-league bug won’t die.
“I go through periods of times when I go back and forth and this doesn’t help, seeing these guys,” Williams said as he scanned the clubhouse. “Any way I look at it, I can’t loose. If I come back, great. If I don’t, great.”
If Williams does return to uniform, it will be as a coach.
“That’s something I would certainly consider in a couple of years down the road,” Williams said. “Right now I am spending too much time playing music.”