Baseball Hall of Famer John Smoltz missed the cut at the U.S. Senior Open after shooting a two-day 22-over-par 162.

However, within that he improved by eight strokes in his second round and each nine represented an improvement of the previous in relation to par. His second round included a long birdie putt on No. 2, a chip-in birdie on No. 12 and a par save from the driving range on No. 17.

He spoke to the media at The Broadmoor after his second round.

Q. What do you take away from this experience?

SMOLTZ: I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget this experience. I plan on being back. I plan on qualifying again. And I just think that if I could do some different things with my time off and get back in the gym and get back in shape. I learned a lot, that I’m not in the kind of shape I need to be in to play this kind of golf. I thought I was.

Q. Have you ever done anything similar to this?

SMOLTZ: Not really. Transferring from starter to closer was a huge, huge hurdle to overcome. I know that the end of the season it looked easy, but it wasn’t, it was one of the hardest thing I ever had to do. This was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done because nothing I’m doing prepares me for this. … Everyone was great. I mean, this place, first time being here, everybody around, I mean I never had so many people rooting for me when I’m making bogeys, and cheering for me and rattling me on and knowing how hard it was. So I’m grateful for that, because when you’re in baseball, I never heard noise. I know there’s a lot of people and there was a lot of noise, but I never heard it. And I was locked into what I was doing. When I heard it, that meant bad things were happening. And today — and obviously you don’t hear noise until you hit, but just everybody, the gallery was super kind and a lot of — it meant a lot.

Q. Did you think about sneaking a Braves hat on at any point?

SMOLTZ: No, I am always going to be a Brave at heart. There was a ton of Braves fans here. I got to catch up on baseball. I got to go to work on Monday. So I got to quit thinking about golf. And I got to start catching back up on my day job. Luckily I’m not going to quit my day job.

Q. What’s your next assignment with baseball?

SMOLTZ: I got the MLB Network Monday through Friday and then I go out to LA with a game with Joe Buck. I saw Joe out there today. It was fun seeing him, he gave me a lot of encouraging — as did all the guys — like, it’s not fun shooting 85 and, honestly, it wasn’t a bad 85, but it sure looks bad when you see the number eight and five. I played pretty good and just didn’t make anything. So today felt like more like me. Making pars from the woods and chipping up and making putts. So that felt more normal.

The rhythm is something I’m still struggling with, because I like rhythm. I like to keep playing. I like to keep moving. The longer I sit, the stiffer I get, I got to learn how to deal with that. And these two days taught me a lot. I’m going to work on it.

Q. Each of your nine holes was an improvement over the previous one. You improved all four nines. Do you take something from that?

SMOLTZ: Yeah, I do. Look, this was not easy in any way. Coming into today people could say, oh, just let it go, you got nothing to lose. Man, when you shoot an 85, you’ve lost your confidence. And so coming in here I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I could shoot a 70 — which I can do a lot — and I felt like I hit some quality shots again today and that to me meant more getting on a plane tomorrow than if I would have shot another 84 or 85.

I’ve done three major events and everyone’s kind of looked at what I’ve shot to see how that gauges on what kind of golfer I’m going to be and, you know, fair or not, I haven’t had some of the better scores. But today, today was something that for me personally was kind of big to shoot 77 after shooting 85.

And scores, I saw a lot of scores like that. So it’s not, it brought down a lot of great golfers.