|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
AL DIVISION SERIES: RAYS VS ASTROSOctober 6, 2019AJ HinchTampa Bay, Florida - Workout Day Q. Asked Charlie about going up against his former team. What's it going to be like going up against Charlie? A.J. HINCH: We've been through that. I don't think it changes a ton other than the stage is a little bigger. We've seen him across the way. We've seen him in another uniform. We've faced him. I think we're past that. I mean, obviously, we will always remember him fondly and with good memories. He's done a lot in this organization. But I think we're at the time of the year where we can get past that pretty quickly. Q. A.J., the playoffs bring the best of your best pitchers, best players. What are you tomorrow looking for to see out of Greinke? Obviously, he's a different type of pitcher but just as capable as Verlander and Cole, what he can bring to the situation. A.J. HINCH: I'd like a win. That would be the best thing to happen to the organization is to get a win. However he needs to do that. In a perfect world, he follows the same script of getting deep into the game and we have the lead and get the final outs however. So he's pitched tremendously well. He's pitched in the playoffs before. Execution is the name of the game for him. So as we get deeper into a series, you always have to adapt your game plan a little bit and tailor it to the guy that's pitching. He can do just about anything we ask him to do. Hopefully, for him, he gets into the game cleanly. That will be the best and most important thing. We get a lead, it puts a ton of pressure on the other dugout. We know what's at stake. What we have to do is apply as much pressure as we can and let Zack settle in and be the elite pitcher that he is. Q. A.J., what is it specifically about your culture that allows any personality that comes over to seem to assimilate very well? A.J. HINCH: People like it here. The winning helps, but the culture really is about just bringing the best version of yourself here. We let guys be themselves. If you're quiet, be quiet. If you're loud, be loud. If you're in between, be in between. I don't think there's one cookie-cutter way to run a team. You have to adapt to the personalities on the team. We work our tail off. I tell these guys from the very beginning, you can be yourself, but we're going to be very elite on the field. We're going to talk a lot about the baseball. Some guys need a little bit more structure, then we give them more structure. Guys need to be left alone, we leave them alone. Our guys as the coach, manager, the team culture and chemistry is about adapting to each individual and bringing out the best version of themselves. So the best thing that helps the culture is winning. That's what's happened here over the last five years. But the consistency of guys being able to get their work in, have some space to themselves whenever they need it. But when we go on the field at 7:00, or tomorrow at 1:00, every single guy knows what's expected of him. Everybody knows what's at stake. It seems to be working pretty well. Q. A.J., closeout games are always really tough. They'll have their backs against the wall. Your team always being up to that challenge and how you approach that. A.J. HINCH: It's not our first time. We've done it on both ends. We've played elimination games as the team needing to win and we've played elimination games where we can close out a series. So we just got to play tomorrow. I don't think we go into tomorrow's game with any sort of different mindset. One of the things that I take the most pride in is our ability to stay in the moment and just play today's game. And we're not celebrating until we get three wins in this series. We're not going to take it for granted. We know across the way those guys are really good and they know how to win. This is a tough place to play. So we're not going to approach tomorrow any differently than we did the 162 in the regular season or the two playoff games we've played so far. Again, that's served us well. We've got a ton of experience and I think that will help not get outside what we do best, and that's play. Q. A.J., since you alluded to it, you obviously won a lot at home and road. What makes this place particularly difficult for a visitor to play in? A.J. HINCH: Mostly the Rays. They play really well here. This is not a place that we come often. It's always nice when you go to places where you go three times a year. Your own division, I think you feel pretty comfortable. We don't play on turf a lot. We do play inside, but our roof's a little darker. So got to make sure you keep your eye on the ball when the ball goes up in the air. And mostly it's all about playing the Rays. The Rays are really good. They're really good in this ballpark. We played them in different times of the year. I mean, in my time here with the Astros we've played them at the end of the All-Star break, we played them at the beginning of the season, we played them a little bit towards the end of the season. We've had some good, we've had some bad. This particular team, when fully healthy the way we are right now, has never really played these guys this season until this series. So I look for good results out of this group. Q. What's the value if you're able to win in Tampa, close it out, not having to use Cole and Verlander again this series? Do you think that would be a big advantage? A.J. HINCH: The biggest advantage is you guys get a day off too. We would love to be done and close the series out. There's no reason for us to want to play any more games other than the ones we have to. If you can escape a series without using, for us in particular, JV and Cole, that would be outstanding setting up for the next series. But, you know, you start wishing for that and not going out on the field and playing for it, you're going to get distracted. So I hope that's the case. That's why we're here is to win game 3 and get on to the next series. But we're going to have to play well and play clean and play like we have. We've outplayed them the first couple of games, but not by much. They've played very well. We've had two elite pitchers pitch tremendously well. We've had some guys in the pen come in and do well. We've had some timely hitting. These are really close games across the board in playoff baseball in the National League and the American League. So tomorrow's going to be just as hard fought as the first couple. Q. A.J., Kyle Tucker, one of the probably best ten hitters probably in the last ten years here in the Tampa Bay high school area. Talk about his development and the decision to go with him in the starting lineup in game 2. A.J. HINCH: He was very popular around the draft time and we knew when we got him, it was the same year we drafted Bregman. We drafted them all within the first few minutes of the draft. We had his brother on our team so we knew a lot about the Tucker family. We knew he was a rising star in the game. As he got to the big leagues pretty quickly last year, we got our first look at him. When he went back to the minor leagues this year, he took it to heart that he struggled the first time around. That was encouraging for us, when he went out and still played and tried to develop different areas, started moving around the field a little bit to both corners and took a few ground balls at first, kept hitting homers. When he got to the big leagues in September, he took a lot of feedback very seriously about how to play, how to be a big leaguer, how to lean on your teammates, how to have a sense of urgency. By applying all of that in September, he was able to earn a start in game 2. Just missed a ball off Snell to left center. A little bit of action in right field. I ended up taking him out of the game and putting Marisnick in. He earned himself into the starting lineup in game 2. He won't be in the lineup tomorrow to start, but we'll expect him to come off the bench. Q. A.J., big picture question. With Verlander and Cole and Greinke, you were able to acquire all three via trades, not trade away any of your key current players. Then even the prospects you've given up here you were able to keep Alvarez and Tucker and Whitley. What has that done for the team to extend this run you're having and have a starting rotation that's now the best in baseball? A.J. HINCH: When you put a team together, they're going to come from a lot of different ways, drafting development, the trade market, the international market. We've got a little bit of everything in that. Now, let me tell you, we've traded a lot of prospects over the last few years. Jeff has been very aggressive in trading guys. While they may not seem like your primary guys when you see all the guys up in the big leagues, they're very good players that we've traded away over the last five years that I've been here. I think the key is always that there's a lot of people that are working at this. There's an international department that's signing these players that are used to better the big league team. There's the supplemental players that we needed this year. We weren't a team that was avoiding injuries. We had a lot injuries this year so we needed 45 players to play. That system that you keep, also the system that you have available to make trades has made Jeff have the resources in order to make these moves. When they come over here, it's our job at the big league level to maximize what our guys are. So it's huge for us. We know when we can roll out in the first three games of this series these three guys, when we get to a game 4, and it's Miley or Urquidy, those are different stories as well, one via free agency, not necessarily buying low, but buying at the end of the market and Urquidy through the national market. You need to build your team from every angle, and this organization has been very, very good at finding the right talent, supplying us with more talent when we needed it, and timely talent, and that's impressive that we've been able to put it all together. Q. How have you handled the availability of Miley and Urquidy tomorrow? A.J. HINCH: They're both available, both in the bullpen all the way through game 3, and we'll make a determination based on the result of tomorrow night what we're going to do. I don't know how long the game's going to go tomorrow. What if we go -- I won't say it because you might have to stick around here. We go long enough, I'm going to use everybody. So they're available tomorrow in the pen, just like game 1 and game 2, and game 3 is what our entire focus is on. Q. From being relatively unsure about Carlos a week ago with the back, three hits in the series, the glove's been great. Do you see an extra bounce in his step? Do you see some confidence you didn't see a week ago? A.J. HINCH: I think I was the least concerned. I know Carlos. I know the communication that we had and how he talked about this latest injury and how we're geared towards getting him ready for the playoffs. He was a little untested in the last week but I wasn't concerned and I said that in the get-go. Even though he missed the last week, it was out of being conservative, not the ability to play. It's been great to watch him. Watch the first play on replay, that's everything you need to know about his current health. To make that play, to make the pirouetting throw, put his body through that, he's doing quite well. The swings, when he's able to pull the ball like that on the line, he did it a couple different times, when he's able to be pretty aggressive on the bases. Those are all signs that he's completely healthy and maybe it was that last week, that last week off when we made sure that that extra health was there for him and he did his work in the training room with Jeremiah, our trainer, and all the guys in there. It proved to be a pretty good plan for him and has put him in a good place and he's done the work. Q. Since you touched on the play by Correa, your infield defense, how important has that been in the first two games of the series? And how much does that help the confidence of the pitching staff that you do have? A.J. HINCH: Underrated play to end the game last night by Yuli. The plays at shortstop by Carlos, a couple double plays in JV's game. Probably could have turned another double play on the ball to Bregman that got stuck in his glove. It's amazing to me with more experience in playoff baseball how much you focus on every single defensive play. A bobble can change the course of a game, a non-play. We've taken advantage on the other side. We've gotten a few extra plays that we've capitalized on. So it's playoff baseball. The team that plays the cleanest is certainly going to put themselves in the best position to eliminate the catastrophe inning or the big blow-out inning. So I've been proud of our defense. I've always said it's underrated. You can argue defensive metrics, DRS, all the fancy numbers. When you watch us play, you come away pretty impressed with how we play defense. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|