NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: ASTROS v CARDINALS

October 14, 2004

Phil Garner

PHIL GARNER: Had we gone ahead, I was going to do that. I would have used him two innings. If we got through the eighth inning still tied, I was going to use him for a couple innings, too.

PHIL GARNER: We'll get it worked out. Thank goodness this wasn't a two-game series. We're not really where we want to be, certainly. But we'll get it worked out. They'll come through for us.

PHIL GARNER: He did a good job. He got us into the fifth and that's where we've had trouble. I thought we could get out of the fifth and still have the lead. Obviously, we didn't do that. But we're in the ballgame. We were in the ballgame the whole way. We fought hard tonight, had opportunities to put more runs on the board with hits here and there. I think three through seven innings we had men on base. We didn't add on like we'd like to do. So our offense will get in gear, too; it's not just pitching.

PHIL GARNER: It didn't appear to affect it. Maybe other than perhaps the pitchers weren't quite as sharp as they might have been on any other night. I don't know if they had a little problem gripping the ball at times, but didn't appear to me to be that much of a factor tonight.

PHIL GARNER: We obviously want to get better at closing out the inning. We've been pretty good about doing that, and we just haven't done it here so far. They've managed to put a couple runs on the board when we should be out of the inning. We're capable of doing that, and I think we'll get better at it.

PHIL GARNER: Yes, we are. Those guys have been our horses all year. We'll turn to them now and ask them to do what they've been doing all year, and that's win for us.

PHIL GARNER: Rolen's two home runs hurt, there's no question. They put three runs on the board. The middle of their order did a lot of damage tonight. If we had pitched to them as well as we did the rest of the lineup, we would have been okay. Bottom line is we've been pretty good at holding or stopping them from going ahead, our opponents, when we get late in the ballgame, we haven't done that the last couple of nights.

PHIL GARNER: No, not at all. Both clubs have good home run strength and good home run power. I'm not surprised that that can happen. I think there's potential to have some low-scoring games and I think it's also potential to have some of what we've just seen the last couple of days.

PHIL GARNER: Yes, that's what I said earlier when I was saying we didn't add on. We've been pretty good at adding on. We didn't move runners a couple of times tonight. We didn't get them in. I would like to have had some, obviously, more hits. You don't want to hang around and let them stay in the ballgame. I feel like with a big hit or there maybe we add runs on to the scoreboard and take them out of the ballgame a little bit. We failed to do that.

PHIL GARNER: I'm going to tell him to keep his head up, keep fighting and we'll get it. You're going to get knocked around sometimes, it's a good ballclub. They're going get us sometimes. It's going to come down to a couple of more games. We're going to need it, Dan is going to need to pitch well, and I think he will.