Who’s Your Daddy: Steve Lyons
Jun 10, 2013, 10:26 PM | Updated: 10:57 pm
Steve Lyons played nine seasons in Major League Baseball, compiling a .252 average with 19 home runs and 196 RBI.
While his playing career, which included stops in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Montreal, was somewhat nondescript, his post-playing career hasn’t been.
Now a color commentator, Lyons has worked for Fox Sports as well as the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers, which is who he is with now.
And he likely would not be there without the guidance he received from his father, and he discussed his dad with Arizona Sports 620’s Burns and Gambo as part of ‘Who’s Your Daddy Week.’
“My dad was easily the greatest coach that I ever had until I got to the major League level, and even in some of those cases he was still a better coach than some of the guys,” Lyons said. “My dad was full of sayings.”
Among the sayings his father had, Lyons said the ones that really stuck with him were “always keep your head up, and that way you won’t ever have to put it down” along with “it takes no ability to hustle.”
“And those two things really resonated with me a lot,” Lyons said. “I think he was pretty much telling me, ‘Man, if you keep your head in the game you’re always ready for a play, if you make a mistake it won’t be because you weren’t ready.’
“And the other thing is just play hard,” he continued. “Guys are always going to be better than you, people are always going to be better than you. There’s people out there that are better than you, but people notice you if you’re playing hard and hustling all the time, and I tried to always do that.”
That advice served Lyons well as a player, and it’s clear it still helps him to this day.
