If he's obviously ready to help us I don't think the calendar will stop us from doing anything. |
If his velocity is OK and he's hitting his spots, he'll know it. |
If nothing else, I loved the way he treated the players. He gave them a lot of room. He was, what's that word, folksy. |
If this guy is not the MVP, holy (bleep), |
If we could have put our finger on it, we would have done it right then and there. I think it's always a combination of things. He got smoked [by the Crawford liner], and that didn't help. His fastball and his slider, for whatever reason, ran together for a period there and took away some of his effectiveness. And then to top it off, he had a bad game in Chicago that everybody remembers. I tend to remember that we also had a guy that pitched in the All-Star Game. The whole season counts. I know everybody remembers how you finish, and it's important, but we've still got a pretty good pitcher. |
If we start getting offense from him, we have a good player. And, again, he's hitting ninth so he doesn't have to hit .300 and drive in 100. I want him to have a chance to show what he can do. So, bailing on him wouldn't be good. |
If we were a bunch of kids trying to look for the future, we?d keep running (Bard) out there, let him track them down. But a lot of what we?re doing is to stay with some pretty good teams in our division, and it was getting harder to do that. |
If we're talking about their pitching next week, then I'm probably not going to be smiling. |
If you go eight innings, ... you're doing something really well. |
If you hit a player during a brawl, a guy gets six [games]. It wasn't like he looked like Muhammad Ali out there. They got tangled up, he took a swing and basically it was over. |
If you start walking him, the two guys behind him have had a lot of success also. |
In a game where we don't need something like that to happen to extend an inning, it does, and it certainly makes it harder for us to win. |
In a perfect world, every player shows up Thursday. But I got to tell you, Manny was very honest. Very forthright. Very amicable. And he assures us that he'll be here March 1 ready to go. |
In the words of our medical people, he's doing very well. That doesn't mean he's going to start playing tomorrow. |
Is it going to happen? It might not happen, but we're trying to cover every base we can. |