The guys at the end are walking a tight rope until Opening Day starts. |
The incentive is the game. You've got to play the game. Regardless of where you are. It seems like this month of August has been horrible and we've been fighting uphill the whole time. Tomorrow is Sept. 1, and hopefully we'll have a great September. |
The last couple days Michael has come up with some heroics. |
The last couple weeks, he has really progressed. It's impossible to predict a rehab. You can't rush him, or he will be in-and-out, in-and-out. Hopefully, it's not too long. |
The last few days, we haven't been as sharp. Baseball players aren't used to getting up at 5, 6 o'clock every morning. You have one day off in six weeks, that's a pretty good grind. |
The main guy will get the majority of the playing time. Is that 60 percent? Is that 70 percent? Is that 51 percent? I'll talk to them. Quite frankly, that's a fortunate situation to have three quality guys. It's not a problem; it's a fortunate situation. |
The main thing is for us to dwell on the solution and not the problem. Just be more alert and more advantageous of all situations, not create advantageous situations for them with mental and physical errors. |
The money doesn't make you play. You play for the love of the game. A lot of times you see money change people. But I don't see anything changing him, and if it did, his dad would take care of it. They're good and humble people. He's still their son. |
The more times you come through, the more times you think you're going to come through. We like to see him come up with runners on base. He has a way of getting hits at the right time. |
The one outing doesn't necessarily put him in there or delete him from it. He'll have quite a few more outings before we make a decision. We'll evaluate him on his progress. He said he learned from it and it won't happen again. He was upset at himself at how he pitched. |
The only mistake 'Z' made was on Delgado. It was supposed to be a fastball away, and it came back over the plate. He made some great pitches and had a big triple for us. It's a great feeling to have that kind of offensive support from everybody. |
The problems starts when he throws a number of pitches. As long as we minimize his pitches, he says he feels great. |
The second [challenge] is to try to break healthy. It's probably the oldest cliche around but you want that health. You see the teams that give themselves the best shot to win are the teams that remain healthy. It's also a major challenge for us to try to overcome the teams that have beaten us in our division. |
The things I want to see out of him is baseball experience and work on fundamental instinctive stuff -- running the bases, hitting the cutoff man, knowing when to run. I've heard that when he gets thrown out, he stops running. When you get thrown out, you need to be more daring. |
The throw wasn't high enough to do that. But we want our guys to be aggressive on the bases. He knows he made a mistake on that one. |