AL DIVISION SERIES: RED SOX v ANGELS

October 5, 2004

Mike Scioscia

MIKE SCIOSCIA: I sure hope so. You know, it was a tough day out there today. I think we talked about it earlier. It's tough to give a club as stacked offensively as they are extra outs, and I think we did, and they took advantage of every one, so that was a big part of the early part of the game.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: In that situation we knew it was going to be tough to double up Johnny Damon, and unless he hit a (inaudible), one of our middle guys or back to the mound, it was going to be tough. And I don't know if Figgie didn't have a grip or lost his angle, but the runner may have come into play, I thought he had an angle -- because the ball was a little bit to his left, but, you know, the ball got away a little bit.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: We will look at some things, and particularly the defensive charts we have kind of glanced over, and see if it's going to give us an extra bat in the lineup in one spot or the other. You know, we don't have a lot of options but we have a couple. We will look closely at them and see which way we will go.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: A series isn't over until somebody wins three games, so naturally, you don't want to get down to the two, but we are not going to pack it in, after tomorrow's game we are going to come out and play it hard and not change any of our focus or velocity from the season. We have to come out here and do some things on a consistent basis and getting down so early by so many runs kind of stifles some of the things we need to do offensively.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: We went for a defensive look when Mezzy hit second base. Figgy was going to be in the lineup somewhere, it just depended if it was second or third.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Whether we won or lost, I don't know if it matters going on previous experience to say, okay, we lost the first game in every playoff round, you did okay. I think that's -- I don't think you are going to look back on that. The makeup of our team is such that we have been turning the page, and you have to do that in a short series, you got to turn the page from one bad play to another in a short series, because every inning is magnified, and we will come out tomorrow and play a good game.

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Well, you know, Curt does what he does best. Very good fastball command, changed speeds when he needed to. I thought he had a lot of good looks at him earlier. By the time -- we had some opportunities early, and he made some tough pitches, too, especially, (inaudible) that we had a couple guys on, and you know what, that's what Curt does. He is great. If you give him a lead, he is good at repeating pitches. I thought we had some runners in scoring position, we had some opportunities, and he made some pitches to tough hitters and he got out of it. Wash, I thought early on the stuff was good. You know, that one inning it just seemed like he had a -- you know, there were teams leading off. He switched well. Some of those pitches were close, but he didn't get them, and that kind of started to set the table for him and Millar hits a change-up that isn't quite in location out of the park. From there I thought we had an opportunity to hit them by some damage and the error obviously broke that inning up and Ortiz -- I mean Ramirez hit a home run, but it wasn't that bad. Wash will be back he. Has got great make-up and he will make better pitches next time?

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Vlad is -- when he sees something he likes, he goes after it. He just missed some pitches today. I think Schilling made some pitches but Vlad missed some of them, so it didn't happen today for Vladimir. One thing with Vladimir, this is his first playoff game, and you want him to keep his same approach, and I think he did. I don't think there was anything he was trying to do that was extraordinary. He was just trying to play. He made some good pitches. He didn't get it done today. A lot of our guys in the club, obviously, when the guy is making that many good pitches, we didn't have -- as the game went on, not as many good looks, but we -- you know, I don't think there was anything Vladimir didn't get hit today. That was basically it. It's no big deal to come back and say you come back and bat tomorrow.