He's very mature for his age. |
Hernandez left two pitches up in the zone, and that turned out to be the difference in the game. |
His command the first two innings was not good at all — the first two innings, everything he threw was in the middle of the plate and waist high. |
His style of play makes him the player he is. When he runs into a wall, he sticks his hand out to brace himself and it hurts his wrist. If he keeps challenging fences the way he has, and I hope he does, then he is going to have to learn to crash into them a little more softly, or brace himself with something else. |
His swing looks a lot better. His mechanics are night and day different from at any point last year. He looks good. |
His trouble has been more mental than anything else. You have to think the 14 days he didn't pitch have set him back. |
His velocity was good from the first pitch on. Joel threw the ball extremely well. |
Hopefully we'll play the (Angels and A's) as tough as we did the White Sox and Yankees. Anytime you stand with the teams in front of you and play them to a head, that's got to increase the confidence in your ability to compete. And that's a very important thing for a young club. |
Hopefully we'll play them as tough as we did the White Sox and Yankees. Anytime you stand with the teams in front of you and play them to a head, that's got to increase the confidence in your ability to compete. And that's a very important thing for a young club. |
Hopefully, we'll use him three or four times. There is nothing wrong with his arm. It was just dead the other day. |
How we're going to limit his innings remains to be seen. We can drop him down in the rotation ... when we have days off, we can skip his turn. There's a lot of things we can talk about. We haven't settled on any one strategy; it may be a combination of plans. But the one thing is that we don't want this kid going out there throwing 250 innings. |
I always have been intrigued by Ichiro hitting third. When I managed against him with Baltimore I was intrigued by the idea. It is not out of the realm of possibility that it would happen here. ... That would never be done without first discussing it with Ichiro. |
I anticipate the starter going five or six, and Gil going two or three. When he gets through that, we'll look at putting him in the rotation. |
I asked him to get some help on it because obviously he didn't see it well enough. And he wouldn't do that. He said the other umpires' attention was in other places. It was his call and he was sticking with it. |
I can go down the list and give you names of people that need to step it up, but I think we all know who those people are. But if they do, we feel like our runs scored total is going to increase dramatically. |