AL DIVISION SERIES: RED SOX v WHITE SOX

October 4, 2005

Terry Francona

TERRY FRANCONA: Yeah, I mean, you watch where Varitek set up. He reached across the plate quite a few times, and the home run to Pierzynski early, it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Breaker ball to Uribe. A lot of mislocations. And again, we talked so much with Matt. He doesn't necessarily exactly have to hit his spots, because his stuff is good, but he missed by some pretty good margins quite a few times.

TERRY FRANCONA: No, it hit him in the leg, but I think it hit him in the wrist first. He had a pretty good seam mark right above where his glove would be where you wear your watch. It was on his glove hand. We wanted to make sure he was okay. You get hit like that, you want to have a second to gather yourself to make sure he's okay.

TERRY FRANCONA: No, we wanted to get him further in the game. We got Bradford up the next inning. We wanted to get Matt through the leadoff hitter. We would bring Bradford in to face the right hitters and get out of the inning, and we could go longer if we needed to. He gave up the home run before we could even get there. It fell apart in a hurry.

TERRY FRANCONA: I would rather not lose. I think what people mean by that is emotionally it's a tough loss when you lose in the 9th inning. We had some time today, unfortunately, to come to grips with the way the game was going. The one thing we didn't do is go through our entire bullpen. That's not an easy game, to sit there and watch us give up runs, but at the same time I don't want to go out there and throw a ton of pitches in a ton of innings in a game we were already down pretty significantly.

TERRY FRANCONA: Again, that was a long time ago. It's a different team. I've said so many times in other questions that last year doesn't matter. What matters to this team is how we bounce back tomorrow. I don't have any doubt that we will bounce back. You know, last year is a long time ago, different team, different scenario. Everything is different. This is another year. I don't have any doubt that we will bounce back.

TERRY FRANCONA: When you look at the final score, that play will probably get passed by. Again, you can slow it down. It looked like Iguchi thought about throwing, and didn't let it go right away. Crede made a great play. If he didn't make that play, they've hopefully or potentially opened up a big inning. That was a big play by Crede at the time. It was a big time in the game.

TERRY FRANCONA: We saw a much more mature pitcher. We have had more success than most teams against him. We have got him in situations where he's tried to maybe throw harder when he's gotten into a bind, and then go almost exclusively at times to a split, and today, he didn't throttle up and start trying to throw 100. He threw a split, not in the zone and out, but he kept the split in the zone for strikes. That's as good -- we've seen him the whole -- I know the run he's been on and today we found out why.

TERRY FRANCONA: Well, no, I mean, we've got a pretty good feel. If we don't make pitches, they're going to hit them if we do that going in. Again, sometimes a team gets on a role and it's hard to stop. Hopefully they had their day and hopefully we'll make tomorrow be ours.

TERRY FRANCONA: I didn't know about the label. I don't particularly care about the label. Part of what they do is put pressure on the bases. Podsednik is a huge part of that, but we knew about the long one. They hit a lot of home runs, but they also have the ability, and we saw it in the game at our place on the make-up game. They can one-run you to death, also. And then when they do hit the home run, it makes it a little bit more significant.