NL DIVISION SERIES: ASTROS v BRAVES

October 8, 2005

Phil Garner

PHIL GARNER: Well, the flow of the game felt pretty good, but you do begin to wonder how many opportunities you're going to let slide by before you tack a bunch of runs on the board. But we did that in the seventh inning obviously, get a nice inning going and put runs on the board. I wouldn't exactly say ice the game, but we did feel more comfortable at that point. But we did a nice job tonight of continuing to add on, even though we let some opportunities slip away. We're not the type of team that's probably going to score 15 runs, but, you know, in tonight's game, seven was pretty good.

PHIL GARNER: No heart-to-hearts, but Mike's stroke is when he keeps the ball in the middle of the diamond. When he swings and keeps the ball in the middle of the diamond, he's going to hit home runs and stay on the breaking ball much better, won't roll over it. Most of this year he's been coming around the ball, surrounding the ball, rolling over, smothering the ball, whatever terminology you want to use. Towards the end of the year, I actually told him on several occasions that we weren't going to win if he didn't start hitting the ball pretty good. He was going to have to stay inside to pitch better. He worked on it the whole last month of the season. As you know, he was swinging the bat a whole lot better and he put some good numbers up last month for us. It was a big plus.

PHIL GARNER: Yes, he did. And going back to Lamb's home run, you know, we had the momentum after the first inning, obviously, on our side. Then we lost it. They took it back from us. And then when Lamb hit the home run, I thought Roy went back out and you saw a different Roy on the mound, he got aggressive, threw his fastball, just went right at them until he gave up a hit in, what, about the sixth inning. (Adam) LaRoche got jammed on a base hit in the sixth inning. I think the Lamb home run, getting the lead again, then Roy's whole approach, looked to me, like it changed. He got to be the Roy of old. I think the seventh inning probably hurt him. It was good, but I think he lost a little bit of momentum going his way there. But to get us to the seventh was good tonight, get us through seven tonight was good.

PHIL GARNER: Well, as he goes, we go. You've seen that in these two games that we've won, he's been the guy that's in the middle of a lot of things. Stuff happens. But he was aggressive tonight at the plate, hit the ball very well. Two doubles? Three doubles? Three doubles tonight. Seemed like every time I looked up he was doing something, so that's the Biggio that we like to see.

PHIL GARNER: Well, I think being on the big stage last year is going to help him. But he was pitching well for us last year when he got there. He pitched a huge game here -- we had the third game here, Game 5, against St. Louis, he did a brilliant job in that game. When he came back from the disabled list, I thought he was being a little too picky, wasn't challenging the strike zone. He's had a start or two here where he's been better at that. When he challenges the strike zone, he gets the job done, he'll do well. There's no time to be tentative, and I don't think he is. I think last year's experience will help him, he'll be able to draw on that.

PHIL GARNER: Well, what I mean by that is Biggio gets us kind of going, but somebody's got to complete the job and Ensberg has been doing that lately. If Ensberg gets a couple of doubles tonight and nobody on base, we don't have anything going on. So I think that's what Biggio's been doing for us, but Ensberg is the guy that's been cleaning it up when Biggio's got something going. True, you've got to have both of them. Ensberg's looming large now and driving in big runs for us.

PHIL GARNER: Well, he had seen Hudson. He's had some success off of Hudson. Atlanta's a little bigger stadium than ours, and he gave us a little bit of better defense in the configuration we had tonight, and I thought that might be a factor.