JUPITER, Fla. • Even before spring training started, Cardinals manager Mike Matheny was pre-emptively apologizing for a word that he plans to use too, too much this spring.

"You're going to hear it a lot," Matheny said. "I'm probably going to wear the guys out with it."

That word is ... excellence.

It makes its first appearance on the workout sheet for Day 3 of spring training, as a handful of the pitchers prep for their second official bullpens of February. Matheny goes Greek on the team today for the quote that appears, in red, at the bottom of the workout schedule posted in the Cardinals clubhouse.

The quote:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

-- Aristotle

This, of course, is Aristotle the greek philosopher and zoologist of Athens and not Aristotle the orange-haired muppet of Sesame Street. Aristotle was a student of Plato and famous for writing Politics, where he argued that a monarchy made sense only if the king and his family was so virtuous and wise that their compassion and intelligence outweighed that of their entire populace they ruled over. Aristotle equated excellence with virtue. Excellence, Aristotle argues elsewhere, is something that can only be achieved by doing things "rightly."

It appears that the quote used today is actually a paraphrase of Aristotle's actual writing. Perhaps, over time, it was simplified for translation. Hard to tell. Perhaps there's a scholar out there who can confirm that.

Regardless, Aristotle wrote a lot about "excellence."

Sources close to Paripatetic school suggest that he never apologized for it.

"With regard to excellence," Aristotle wrote, "it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it."

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