AL DIVISION SERIES: TWINS v YANKEES

October 2, 2003

Ron Gardenhire

RON GARDENHIRE: We count on our defense a lot. Early in the year we weren't making a lot of errors but we weren't making a lot of plays. And that was one of the areas that we were worried about. We talked a lot about just because you are not making errors doesn't mean you are always making the plays. I am talking about when you are supposed to get a double play, you get the double play. We didn't do those things earlier in the year. That's something we take a lot of pride in. We work very hard on that. We talked a lot about that, holding runners to one base instead of two, staying away from the big innings. Those are the things we have done very well the second half of the season.

RON GARDENHIRE: I don't think we'll be too excited. Emotionally we are going to be fired up, the whole package. We handle ourselves okay. New York brings some excitement. We all know that, and you have to calm them down a little bit but our guys understand where we're at. We won a game, but we are trying to take it day by day and we're going to come out and try and do the same thing. It's a great baseball team over there. We have only won one baseball game. We know it takes 3. We're going to come out I think very business-like and go after the game hopefully the same way. We're going to have to try to pitch very well and catch the ball. Find a way to score runs off Pettitte who has been very, very good.

RON GARDENHIRE: I never felt that we weren't going to come out of it. My only concern was that we had to pitch and I always thought we had the pitchers in place to be able to do that. The other parts of the game, catching the ball, we do those things, we work too hard on them not to come out of situations where we are making mistakes. I thought if we could get our pitching straightened out and stay healthy in the second half we were going to get out of it. Right before the first half ended we went on I think a seven or eight, nine-game losing streak. That was pretty tough to take. We look for the break to give us a little bit of mental break then we said we're going to come out. We opened with Oakland in Seattle at home. We knew that was going to be a sign of what was going to happen the second half. We swept Oakland. I can't remember exactly what we did against Seattle but we played pretty good against them. I thought we were going to be okay. As far as saying, no, we are done, I never said that because I really believed in this baseball team. We had too many players that have too much pride.

RON GARDENHIRE: Well, I will take my chances with the Yankees' defense too. They are a great baseball team. They don't lose too many baseball games because of defense. So a couple of mistakes here and there, tough plays, whatever you want to call it, but we are an aggressive baseball team, we catch the ball. We have all said it along in the Playoffs, it's who pitches the best and makes the least mistakes. In the first game we made the least mistakes and we pitched pretty good too. After our starter went down, our bullpen did a helluva job. I thought he was unbelievable Mussina. Whoever makes the least mistakes has a big chance to win big games at this time of the year and fortunately for us we were on the good end of those.

RON GARDENHIRE: It's a loud place. It's tough for people to come in there. We have a speed team. We bang the ball around on that Astroturf, use it to our advantage and we try to run around there. When we get that going, when we get our guys slapping the ball around, we can be pretty exciting baseball team running around the bases. When our fans get into it they get into it; they are loud. They start waving the hankie. It gets you pretty pumped up in there and the guys get pretty excited. But more than anything else, it's a fast surface and that plays to our advantage a lot of times. When the Yankees came in earlier they took us out of our game completely. Their starting pitchers were dominant. I think they were on a streak of 16 and 0 and they didn't give us any chance. That can happen. We have seen it happen there. The pitching comes in and shuts you down, takes you out of your game because you can't run and the Yankees did that. So we know what the Yankees can do and we're not going to give them anything. We have to go play our best baseball. We know to beat these guys. That's just the way it is no matter where we're playing them.

RON GARDENHIRE: We don't even think about that. Honestly, we forget about the payroll stuff once we get out on the baseball team. We have been there and seen it. We know what we have to do to develop our players and we know where we're at budget-wise. We just throw that stuff out. We go out and play with what we have. We try to develop a good baseball team, try to fill holes with -- whenever we can with talented players that we've developed in the Minor Leagues. That's just the way we do it. We have -- if we start looking at the numbers, it gets ugly. That's the bottom line. But, shoot, you think we wouldn't want to have a team full of Giambis and Jeters and stuff, sure. We develop our own players and we develop them for our ballpark and the way we think that we have to play and that's a little speed, a little this and that. But we can't worry about the salary stuff. It just -- that's a non-issue with us. We just go and play.

RON GARDENHIRE: I think I understand that, you know, the situations for us to go and sign a guy that's going to make 10 or 11, $12 million, we're going to have to lose a couple of our 2 or $3 million players to get that guy. I understand that. I don't have to be told that. So the guys when we were looking at players and talking about players, we go get players we know that fit our market and fit our budget and that's just the way it is. I don't have to be told that. Terry Ryan and I talk a lot about our needs, where we can and can't go. It's really pretty simple. It is not a big issue, free agents like last year there was guys out there, sure, we would say, boy, it would be great to have them. We knew that if we got one of those guys it was going to cost us two or three of our young kids and we weren't going to do that.