It's a sad day, but you can't help but smile when you think of Kirby Puckett. You really appreciate his baseball ability. But this is a time to reflect on him as a person. I'm in between whether I should cry or laugh. |
It's a unique place, |
It's been a great ballpark for everybody the fans and players yet it's probably time for something new when you see it the way we see it. There's a lot of great memories here. |
It's just a weird, sad feeling. Every time I saw him, he was the same guy. He made me smile. He made me laugh. He made me feel good. I was always glad to see him. |
It's man to man now. Let's see what you've got. |
It's not like I'd call him at home or anything like that, but I saw him different places around the country and he was always the same old Puck to me. He was always smiling, and he'd make you smile. |
It's not like the Championship Series, where you're so close to getting there. Now that you're here, you can relax. |
Maybe a 'good morning' when he walked by once. |
Only he really knows how he feels at the plate. Until he wants to really open up to me and wants to maybe go to a different place, there's not a whole lot I can do. I can just encourage him. |
People named their dogs and their kids Kirby. You name streets after guys like that, and they did that, he's just a special guy. |
That was the first World Series in an indoor stadium, so it was kind of a novelty. It was extremely loud. We've had very, very similar moments here where you can actually feel it on your body. |
The noise is comparable. The advantage we have here is not the advantage we had in the dome. In the dome, opponents tended to lose the ball in the roof and lights. That's not the case here. |
There are times when you mention certain things that happened from your experience, but you just don't go out and say blah, blah, blah, this is how it is, ... I've told them that we were not very good on the road, and we were very good at home, especially late in ballgames. We weren't the best team in baseball. We weren't the best team in the American League, but we got into the tournament, and we got hot. That's exactly what this team has done here. |
You know that the true test comes when things are not going good. He went through that here. |