We feel good about the talent we have. Now we have to push that talented group to achieve more. We have to win more games. |
We have made Jason an offer. He's a well-rounded player and he's performing at a high level. We also have a great deal of trust in what he will be able to do in the future. |
We have such good pitching coming ... to think we've got Jack and Castillo the next four years is a very good feeling. |
We have talked to a lot of people in the industry to gather information. A lot of people are calling and are interested. ... It's good to see there are so many [good] people out there, a nice, experienced group of guys and up-and-comers like Fredi Gonzalez. |
We have to consider that he hasn't pitched much up to this point, and he's had some bumps and bruises. But we haven't made any determination. |
We have to get the numbers down to be able to get the right guys innings. |
We hope that will be sooner rather than later. |
We need to preserve our starting pitching depth. |
We need to score more runs, and he can be a big part of that. |
We need to try to continue to get him at-bats. Because of his path the last couple of years, he hasn't had the normal number of at-bats that your prospects have. I think it's important that we get him a lot of playing time at third base. ... We want to exhaust the opportunity for him to play third base, because we are looking at our future. |
We obviously wanted to get him to an expert in that area. Once [Thompson] examined him and had all of the information, he did the angiogram to get kind of the gold standard of evaluations. |
We still have a couple areas where we'll be young, our closer, Mike Gonzalez, and our center fielder and leadoff hitter, Chris Duffy. But they're talented players. |
We still have him for an extended period of time, but we feel it makes sense to make him an offer. He's mature, he's intelligent, he's humble and he's courteous. He is a professional, and with that he gives you a feeling of trust as to how he will keep performing. |
We think he's a healthy player. |
We understand that we have four pitchers in particular that are works in progress and trying to get established at the Major League level. [As far as] changing roles, there's a lot of different things we've got for options, but we're basically going to give them a little bit of time to see how things go. |