AL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: RED SOX v YANKEES

October 19, 2004

Joe Torre

JOE TORRE: Well, hell, I mean, Curt Schilling was brilliant tonight, you certainly can't -- that's tough to say what you aren't doing when he pitched like he did tonight. I thought he had good command, his velocity was fine. I'm sure he's thrown harder but he was still, you know, 93, 94. So to me I thought our approach was fine. We just, you know, we had the first and second, nobody out and we couldn't do anything. It was just one of those things as far as he was concerned. We got into it a little bit later on, and, you know, fell a little short.

JOE TORRE: No question. We are evenly matched. If you -- unless you've been locked away somewhere, you don't have to ask me what happened. You've watched, this we've played two extra-inning games, and tonight the game ends with the tying run at first base. No question, the Red Sox, you know, we certainly respect their ability to play the game, and the way they have came out and Derek Lowe who got lost in the shuffle really kept them in that ballgame the other day. I guess it was supposed to come to Game 7. We'll see what happens. ?

JOE TORRE: Game 8?

JOE TORRE: It did last year, and sometimes it happens in a startling way. And tonight's game looked like it was just going to be a yawn the way Curt was pitching, but we managed to shake it up a little bit and get it going. And Jon Lieber, incidentally pitched dynamite. Just one bad pitch to Bellhorn cost us three runs but he certainly hung in there and pitched very well. Again, it looked like we have been trying to close the deal in three days and now put pressure on ourselves to do that, and now there's no pressure involved. Need to go out and win a ballgame.

JOE TORRE: My starting pitcher, we have not decided that. We're going to take some phone numbers and make some calls later. Mel and I are going to talk about it after I finish all of this stuff. Obviously there are a number of people we can choose from and it may be piecemeal or whatever going in. The home run, you know, I can understand the umpires getting together and overruling it. Everybody saw the play better than Jimmy Joyce down the left-field line and I appreciate the umpires getting something right. The other one I had a problem with, because Randy Marsh was closer than anybody else and it was like it was a bodies all over the place. There were a lot of bodies in front of me so I can't give you firsthand what I saw. There's a lot of consideration, there is, and I was upset that it turned out the way it did for a couple of reasons. First off, they said that that Arroyo was in motion, too; it's like not like he was standing there. And there was also a player on the Red Sox who was in the line that didn't have the ball, you know, which can be an obstruction play. So there are a lot of things that went on that didn't fall our way. That's the way it goes.

JOE TORRE: I was here, I remember.

JOE TORRE: To me I'm always a believer in the team that won the last game is the one that has the momentum. Last year, the Red Sox won the last game, Game 6, and we were able to fight back and win Game 7. That's what we're going to have to do this year. You really can't carry baggage. I'm not saying that you feel good about the fact that you lost three in a row, there's no question you don't feel good about it, but this game, you prove yourself to yourself every day. We just have to call on the reserves that, you know, enabled us to bounce back from a lot of challenges all year.

JOE TORRE: What I'm saying, we have not talked to everybody. We stayed away from doing that because we didn't want to address, just like you asked me about tomorrow night and I said I was going to dinner; we'll have to cancel those dinner reservations. We didn't talk to anybody about pitching tomorrow night. The game is over now and we still haven't covered all of the bases in that regard. So, I really don't want to mention names other than the fact that you know you could probably guess in your mind who is the most rested. But again, we may go out there and get three innings from one guy and two innings from another guy but we really haven't sat down.