MLB WORLD SERIES: MARLINS v YANKEES

October 24, 2003

Jack McKeon

JACK MCKEON: Our Game 6 starter is gonna be Josh Beckett. We sat around, decided that we were gonna go with our best two pitchers in 6 and 7. We know that everybody wonders why, wonders why you should, wonders why you shouldn't. We figured we might as well go with our best. We're gonna try to win one at a time. We're not looking back to Game 7. We're looking to Game 6.

JACK MCKEON: Who's pitching the best for us right now has been Beckett and Pavano.

JACK MCKEON: Well, on the plane it was pretty good. We didn't have much time to sit around and visit with those guys. But I'm quite sure... I didn't plan that (cell phone ringing).

JACK MCKEON: I wonder if this is... I'll just turn it off. Last time my granddaughter got a lot of national publicity. Maybe they're watching and they're seeing, one of them other kids is trying to get in on the act! (Laughter). Where were we?

JACK MCKEON: The attitude, I think, is very positive, no question about it. When you come into Yankee Stadium with a one-game lead, you're confident but you're not overconfident. We know that this is a very, very tough Yankee ballclub. They don't go down easy, as we found out in the last couple days; even when we had the lead, they battled. They're professionals. They know how to win. Certainly, it's not an easy task. But our guys are confident. Hopefully, we can do our job.

JACK MCKEON: It's difficult. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. A good example is, I know people say, "Hey, they saved Pedro for the Game 7, he lost. They saved Schmidt for Game 5, they never got to Game 5." Andy Pettitte, three days' rest against us, pitched a masterful job. I mean, who's got the answers? Everybody's got their own opinions. We do, too. We feel that we're gonna go out there and try to win Game 6. We're not setting up to win Game 7 because you don't know whether you'll have a chance to win Game 7 if you did get to Game 7. We're gonna try to win Game 6. If we can't win Game 6, we're gonna try to win Game 7 with the best guys we have that are pitching for us right now.

JACK MCKEON: We've been doing it for quite a while. I don't have the remedy, I wish I did. I think they go out there, they have fun. I think they came to the conclusion that anybody didn't give us a chance in any of the postseason games. That made them go out there say, "We don't have any pressure on us. Let's go out there, have fun. Everybody expects us not to be here, let's surprise them."

JACK MCKEON: They had the curse over there with the billy goat and all those guys in Chicago, the curse in Boston. First time I heard about the curse here.

JACK MCKEON: The ghosts, I don't know about the ghosts or not. I am not worrying about the ghosts, I'm worrying about the Yankees. I don't believe in that stuff. If everybody else wants to believe, like I told the people in Chicago, you want to keep believing about the hex and Billy the goat, keep believing because that will help us.

JACK MCKEON: Well, I think they're showing them that sometimes you can't predict in the wintertime how clubs are gonna go. I mean, you can go out there, predict a lot of good club with a lot of great talent, maybe someone during the off-season made a great acquisition or two in the free-agent market, all of a sudden this team is labeled "unbeatable." Yet, the desire and determination of a lot of young guys and the maturity of a lot of young guys which, in our case, has happened, all of a sudden comes along. Great determination and desire sometimes, you know, takes over. But I think that these guys are on a mission. Whether we can accomplish it or not, I think you got to give them a lot of credit for the great ride they've had so far. They're not ready to give up right now. Because we're up 3-2, we're not taking that as we're in the driver's seat. No, we got two tough games, hopefully only one, but we know there is possibility of two tough games ahead. This is a very experienced ballclub we're playing. We've got to stay focused to beat them.

JACK MCKEON: First of all, we discussed with Josh and the pitching coach, some of the other pitching coaches. We talked to Josh to see how he's feeling before we made the decision. He was very anxious to get the ball; he's a gamer. He wants the ball. We sat on it for a long time. Finally, yesterday we said, "Hey, Beckett and Pavano have pitched the best for us in the playoffs. Let us go with the best we got and take our chances." I know if I pitched somebody else, they got beat, everybody would say, "Why wouldn't you go with Beckett?" If Beckett goes out and gets beat, three days' rest... Years ago, it was a four-man rotation. Everybody pitched. Beckett pitched extremely well with two days' rest in Chicago when he came in and relieved for four innings. He was outstanding. Really was the turning point of that series because the Cubs wanted no part of him. He's a resilient kid. Even though he's a youngster, he hasn't pitched that much this year, but he's come into his own in the postseason. Right now we feel that's our best shot. We're gonna take our chances, put our best out there, and hope for the best.

JACK MCKEON: Didn't have any -- I don't know.

JACK MCKEON: He'll go to the bullpen. I mean, his reaction, I don't know. You'll have to talk to him. We operate on this club that we put the egos at the door, we don't care who pitches, who hits, who gets the win, who gets the loss, who gets the credit, who gets the close, who gets the save. Everybody is a one-man unit here; 25 guys pulling together and we hope they understand, we try to make the best decisions we possibly could. One guy's in charge. That's me. I have to live or die with the decisions I make. I get input from my coaches and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If it works, it works.

JACK MCKEON: Well, I looked to last week when Pettitte came back on three days' and did an excellent job against us. It's tough to sit up here. You read one day that you should have picked Beckett, one day you shouldn't pitch Beckett. You got to be subject to second-guess no matter how you can do. If you guys have the exact answer right here, I'll tell you right now, I'll take a poll. If somebody else wants me to change the pitching rotation, I'll be glad to listen to you if you know it's gonna work (laughter) is that being fair with you? Speak up now! But we have to make the decision what we think is best for our club. We can't worry about what anybody else thinks. We've done it all year.

JACK MCKEON: "Historically" don't mean a thing when you're playing the Yankees. I mean, you got to look at the individual. You go back and would anybody -- if I had Bobby Gibson out there today on three days' rest, would anybody be asking me how I pitch Bobby Gibson? Nobody. That's the way we feel about Beckett.

JACK MCKEON: I don't know whether you can say that, really. We don't look at it that way. We look at the Yankees as a very, very tough club. You saw the games. Here we are with nice leads, you have to sweat it out because they have so many weapons in their arsenal over there that they can turn the ball game around just like that (snapping). We feel we have to do the best we can to not let that happen. But I don't think the momentum, I wouldn't say that they were down or we had any kind of momentum going in there. We just got a one-game lead. But we've also been on the other side of the fence, too, where we're down one or two games and had to come back. So we know that it's very, very possible that that could happen here, too.

JACK MCKEON: He's valuable in the bullpen, but when you get back to is it too big a risk, I don't know. Right now, as I said earlier, we're going with the guys that are pitching the best for us. We're not gonna run a tryout camp out here and say, "Hey, we'll try this guy and see if it works." The guys who have produced for us, we're gonna send out there. I think the Yankees would be the same way, and any other club for that matter.

JACK MCKEON: Well, I have to be honest with you, it's one game at a time. I haven't changed. I'm not gonna -- we're not panicking, go out and win it today, tomorrow, the next day. We're just gonna try to take tomorrow night's game and do the best we can. If that doesn't work, we'll work on it Sunday. We're gonna approach it the same way we have been. We're gonna use our bullpen if we have to, to try to win one game.

JACK MCKEON: I didn't pay much attention to what the headlines were. Really, they probably want to talk about my age, if anything. They want to know if this guy had some kind of a input with AARP to push him in to get this job or something (laughing). Wanted to know if I was on the Board of Directors of AARP trying to promote the company. I don't really remember anything. I'll tell you, you're asking about the headlines. I took the job on a Saturday night, met the club at 10:30 in the morning. Played one game and hopped on a 14-day road trip. I didn't get a chance to read much about any headlines.

JACK MCKEON: Well, we go through this quite often, any time a reliever has a little problem, I know with my writers, I have a lot of fun. They're always wanting the question, "Looper had some problems, does he get pushed back and Urbina come in," then when Urbina goes bad, they want to know if Looper is gonna jump ahead again. Both of those guys have done an excellent job. As I said before, relievers sometimes have a tough time for a game or two and settle back. You guys that haven't been following us or staying with us for any length of time, except for the postseason, you were down in Florida one time when Looper came in and blew two games, they are ready to hang me, "How could you bring him in?" Then all of a sudden Urbina gets slacked a couple times. They say, "Why don't you use Looper?" What do you do? Both of these guys are good. We have confidence in both of these guys. We know they're gonna have their ups and downs and we have to live with it. That's, once again, you're going with the best you have. They've been successful and that's the best. We'll go with the best and we'll continue to go with Looper and Urbina. If we win, fine. If we lose, we're still gonna shoot the best we got out there.

JACK MCKEON: I would consider it all the time. I don't think you can do it. I don't think that you can go back to that anymore, really. Yeah, I'd like to see it. I think with some club I was with, Oakland or somebody, went with a four-man rotation for a while. I did it in the past. When I first managed Kansas City, we had a four-man rotation. But then the way the game has changed so much is you program your kids in the Minor Leagues to five days. Now you got guys, mentally prepared, that they need all these extra days. It's tough. Then plus the fact you got agents that say, "We don't want to work these guys too much." I go back to Johnny Sain was my pitching coach years ago. He used to talk about the fact that years ago, he said, "We pitched with two days' rest. We had no problem pitching in two days' rest." He said, "We knew the only way we could make money is to win 20 games." So we figured if we'd got 40 starts, we could win 20 games. We might be 20-20, but we're gonna win 20. These guys were concerned with getting starts. Now we got a situation where we're concerned with innings pitched, don't rock the boat and push these guys too hard. I've been on clubs where guys were dying to take the ball in three days' rest, two days' rest. How many times in my career did I have a double-header that messed up the rotation. I have the two starters that pitched in that double-header, I wanted , "Hey, who wants to go? The guy, the big winner, the 14 -, 15-game winner. You want to pitch? " Well, I'd rather go on my regular turn." "Good." Then the other guy jumped in, said, "I'll take the ball." Then what happened? The day the kid with the three days' rest took the ball, we scored runs and won easy. The guy with the regular rest got the hell kicked out of him. Who knows? Same thing could happen tomorrow. Same thing could happen Sunday, if there is a Sunday.

JACK MCKEON: Same line-up with Encarnacion. Batting order, we'll decide that later on. Yeah, Encarnacion will be in the line-up, right-hand hitter. Outside of that, the rest of them will be the same.

JACK MCKEON: I didn't know much about Conine when we got him, but I did know a little bit about his reputation. After doing a little research and people that knew him, played with him, you found out he was a very intense player, very competitive, very good competitor, and a guy that was a tremendous influence in the clubhouse. Then when we acquired him, he got off to a very, very shaky start. He didn't hit -- he was probably hitting about .100 for the first two weeks. You look, say, "Oh, God." All of a sudden, I kept saying this guy will turn it around for us. Last week of the season, I said to our writers, "I have a feeling Conine is gonna be a very, very important force this last week of the season," which he was. He made clutch plays, got clutch hits. But what he brought to the clubhouse was a lot of fire, a lot of experience and especially playoff experience. And he was able to soothe the nerves of some of these young kids that had never been there before, plus be a leader on the field by doing the job and getting a lot of clutch hits and clutch plays.

JACK MCKEON: Yankee Stadium, to me, Yankee Stadium is the epitome of baseball, really. This is the World Series, to me. When you think World Series, and of course, I grew up close by over here in New Jersey. I was always a Yankee fan. I spent a lot of time at Yankee Stadium. Seemed like they got to the World Series so often, you think there can't be a World Series without having the Yankees in it. When we were sitting there in Chicago waiting to see who we were gonna play, the Red Sox or Yankees, we didn't really care, we were happy to be there. But down deep in my heart, I'm saying, "I want to play the Yankees, 'cause that's something special. Your first World Series, you get to play in Yankee Stadium in the World Series. Win or lose, this is special." But I think the tradition of Yankee Stadium and the World Series with the Yankees is very special. Second part of the question is the car. Well, yesterday afternoon I was in my office about noon and Jeffrey Loria came in. He said, "You got a minute?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I want you to step outside. I want to show you something." We went out into the parking lot. There was this 2004 Mercedes SL 500 sports car, and said, "How do you like that?" I thought it was his car. I thought it was one of his new cars, he bought. I said, "That's pretty. That's a real nice thing." He said, "Here, here's the keys. It's yours." I want to just say, "This is a token of my appreciation for what you've done for me, the Marlins and South Florida." I was stunned, excited, and really appreciative of that fine gesture. He's been a great owner to work for. I worked for a lot of them. Believe me, we've had a tremendous relationship. I enjoy him. I think he's the best owner I ever worked for in baseball.

JACK MCKEON: I don't follow the upsets anymore. Once again, what's an upset when you look at it? We're two talented teams going at each other, could be a case where one team gets some breaks, other teams don't. But as far as "upset," I don't know. But it would rank very, very high on the top of my list, probably the top of all. I couldn't top it any other way as far as personally. It's just great to be here. I appreciate it, after spending 50-some-odd years in baseball. This is what everybody dreamed about. I'm just thanking God that he gave me the opportunity to get here.

JACK MCKEON: He's done a tremendous job. I tell you what, I would say from mid season on, you could see Pavano starting to put it all together. He just kept getting better and better as the season progressed. And the one good thing you like about Pavano, he's consistent. He'll go out and he'll throw strikes. He'll keep you in the game for six or seven, eight innings. He's improved his pitches, he's got much better pitch selection. He's got much better control. But the thing that I think, when we used him, when we put him in the bullpen, once again, we're talking about Willis and other guys, we looked at our rotation against the Cubs and we felt that this was the best way to go, with him in the bullpen. Of course no kid likes to be starter and go to the bullpen, but he took it like a man, said, "Hey, I'm interested in helping the team. Anything you decide is gonna be fine with me." He did an excellent job in relief against the Cubs. He dazzled them. Now we came down to the Game 6, who do you start? Do you start Penny, who struggled against the Cubs in a couple games, or do you go with the guy that has been very successful against the Cubs and we decided to go with Pavano. People, "How can you pitch this guy? He pitched two innings relief the day before, two days' rest, three days' rest," that stuff. He went out and pitched a magnificent game. He's just been a steady guy for us in the postseason and is getting better and better. He's got a great determination and great desire to succeed. I think he's a much better pitcher today than he ever was.

JACK MCKEON: I agree. I agree. I think this game is simple. You just got to make it simple. You talk two days, three days, it's in the mind. You want to keep putting in people's mind that they can't pitch in three days, they'll believe it. But you pitch, the way the organizations are, you got to have four days, five days. Beckett pitched, he had six days' rest before he pitched against the Yankees. So we didn't want that to happen either, but just so happened it worked out that way. But I think a lot is made of it. I think it's up to the individual, how strong the individual is, what his mental make-up is. That's the key. I mean, there's guys on the Yankees, guys on my club that pitched two days' rest, if you get down to it.