There is natural ability and there is skill. There is an art to pitching. It's a skill position. It's not easy to throw quality pitches. It's not easy to throw the ball where you want to when you have that kind of velocity and that kind of movement. It boils down to being able to harness that stuff and throw it on the corners down in the zone. It's not easy to do. On a given day, Kip can do it. On another day, he can't do it. |
There is no easy way to determine if a guy is done or not. We weren't going to let him go out for that [next] inning. [Pitching coach] Spin [Williams] basically told him that he was done to see his reaction because you can read a guy's face. He was hot. He couldn't believe he was coming out, which helped us make the decision to keep him back in there. |
There's a lot of upheaval. We're vagabonds. We live year to year. |
This is what happens when you have problems like this. All this macho, 'Drill him, he drilled us.' I'm not interested in that type of stuff. It was an accident, it just happened to occur to Luna. What else can I say? It's unfortunate. I couldn't even argue. I didn't want to argue to give it any merit. |
Two outs, man on second. And everything kind of fell apart. |
We all knew he was a better hitter than he was showing early in the season. Now, is he the 200-hit guy he was (in 2004) or the .260-.270 guy he is now? He's probably somewhere in the middle. But if Jack was anything close to what he his now, we probably would have won more games in the first half. |
We expect him to hit, that's why he's playing so much. |
We hid all the carts. And we steel-reinforced the tips of his shoes. |
We think he's got a chance to be a pretty good pitcher. Whether that's in the bullpen or as a starter we're not exactly sure, but we want to give him every opportunity to start. |
We want to win games and winning is part of development. But we've got to develop the young players. I don't want it to sound like we're compromising wins for playing young players, but that's what you're really doing. We're playing for next year. That's what you've got to do. We have to be good next year. |
We were concerned he was going to have a high pitch count early. But he had a good angle down in the zone. He threw some good sliders. In general, that's as good as he's looked in a long time. Unfortunately, his stamina isn't built up to where we'd like it to be. |
We wouldn't want him to go past 120 pitches. I would have loved to have sent him out to get a complete game, but it would have put him past that threshold and I'm not willing to do that. |
We'll take it inning by inning. We'll hope he can economize his pitches. |
We're dying for Oliver Perez to show us the true form that he has. We want him to get back on track. |
We've got so many young players, and [these situations aren't] a big deal in the Minor Leagues. The game counts, the statistics count, so you might as well get up for it. You don't have to like it, but you still have to compete. |