AL DIVISION SERIES: TWINS v YANKEES

October 2, 2003

Ron Gardenhire

RON GARDENHIRE: No we had a chance tonight. We carried that game deep. You know if you eventually stay in those games all those great hitters coming up through there, you make a mistake like we made one mistake, it ends up costing us some runs. You don't leave with a good feeling. We won a ballgame here but sure we had a good chance again to win here tonight. Pettitte was very, very tough. He didn't give us many opportunities. Every chance we had seemed to come with two out and he made a lot of quality pitches. He was pretty damn good.

RON GARDENHIRE: Yeah, I considered everything. But you just start looking down the line-up. They just got so many hitters there. You start thinking could I get a double play here; should I bring in a lefthander. Hawkins is my best pitcher. We had a base open there. If he loses him that's fine, go at him as hard as you can throw; 95, 96 miles an hour. If we miss we got the base open, we can -- he will go on the base, then we will have to go after Bernie anyway. We don't think we're going to double him up too many times. I brought in Hawkins. He has been pretty hot and he goes at hitters pretty hard. If he would have missed he missed. He got a ball down. Giambi banged that ball pretty hard. Sure, you consider everything, but you trust in your arm out there. If he missed him, no big deal; we had a base open. We're going to go at hitters and take our chance. That lineup, like I said, has a lot of good hitters.

RON GARDENHIRE: No, I just think that we had some situations where he threw the ball in areas, he got behind on Soriano and he had to come at him and he got a ball down there where he can get the bat to it. The more you see a guy, sure, you are going to have a chance at him. But Hawkins is pretty much our best pitcher. He has been that way and it doesn't matter how many times you face him. He has been throwing the ball pretty good. They got a couple of hits off him tonight, but same situation, we'll probably do the same thing. Run out there and he will go at him. If he makes a little bit better pitch, gets it to a different zone, who knows what happens.

RON GARDENHIRE: We try -- we were 30-and-0 in the Playoffs. We feel pretty good about our baseball team. We know what the Yankees bring here and the crowd was into it. It was a heck of a baseball game. Brad, he got there to about 100 pitches. I thought sitting there in that long inning, God bless America, I never like those situations because it takes a long time and the pitcher has got to sit there for an extra amount of time, then he goes out there and he ends up hitting the first hitter right in the butt. We have seen that happen to our pitchers before when you have those long innings like that. It does seem to happen that way. That's just part of the game. But he still had pretty good stuff. He didn't want to come out of there, I am sure, but when you got a chance to stop it there you know you are not scoring too many runs off that guy. They got Rivera down there. You try to stop him. It didn't work out that way.

RON GARDENHIRE: He's having a pretty good year. He has got great stuff. We all know that. The ball is falling off the table, the slider, his fastball is jumping, he was hitting his spots pretty good, he threw some slow curve balls in there, a couple of change-ups. Just never gave us the same look the whole night. He mixed it up. He ran that ball down and in really hard tonight. He was just tough. Cold night and he was getting after us pretty good. We got a couple of chances on him but it always seemed with two outs and he made the pitches when he had to; that's why he's won so many games this year, pretty good pitcher.

RON GARDENHIRE: No doubt, you start looking at it like that, you can't let anything get away from you. That's why in a game like that -- I didn't think we could let them score another run; that's why I went to Hawkins again you have to shut it down there and just like you said, it's a short series, every game is so important here. You just try not to let any of them get away. Radke was throwing great but Hawkins is my hottest pitcher, late in the game, Soriano has a couple of hits or Jeter is coming up after that and we didn't want to get out of that inning without giving up a run. It's a short series. You are trying to win every ballgame.