AL DIVISION SERIES: RED SOX v ATHLETICS

October 6, 2003

Ken Macha

KEN MACHA: I don't know the exact pitch count after five innings, but he was well under his limit. He actually was mowing them down pretty good. He went 3-and-0 on Varitek and then battled back and then got a home run to tie it up. He walks Johnny and pops up Nomar and he hits Walker. He made some pretty good pitches to Manny. The guy hit a three-run homer off him. We're pretty thin down there in the bullpen, Keith Foulke wasn't available. We were going with our best guy right there. I don't think there was a question at that time. He had pitched great.

KEN MACHA: The last time Manny faced them they had a runner on second with two outs and he struck them out with a fastball, threw it right by them. We had done a good job with him up to that point, when the series started was to try to not have anybody on base with them, and we did actually did a great job on them.

KEN MACHA: Everybody is going to talk about that. I don't think that's really a fair question there. We had the bases loaded, we battled back. To me, if you take this whole series and put it all together, they are five great games. Five great games. It's a tremendous series. My hat's off to them. They played good. Tonight's ballgame was pretty good. It's a shame somebody has to lose.

KEN MACHA: Not at all. I was hoping to get both runs in. As I said, we were thin in the bullpen and we were trying to score both runs.

KEN MACHA: Their bullpen, actually, they brought Lowe in to pitch the first game, brought Wakefield in for relief. I thought the guy that did a great job was Tomlin pitching three innings. He showed an explosive fastball there. We had gotten a hit off Embree. He got both of the guys out in Game 1, Durazo got the hit off him to tie the game. All the guys' velocity, threw the ball hard, made some good pitches. We did what we could this last game to get back in there and got some patient at-bats, got some guys on, executed a bunt, didn't get the ball in play after that. Give credit to Lowe. He made some great pitches.

KEN MACHA: I sent Adam up there yesterday, three hits, swung the bat good. I was thinking perhaps they may walk him. Then I would have Chris up there hitting with one out and Chris got some speed, chance of a double play diminished a little bit. At the end we used Terrence at the end, we're down to our last hope, if we had tied the game it would have been an interesting defense configuration. We threw out everything we could and Terrence was probably going to play first and we would have had an interesting defensive line. I'm proud of our guys. We battled these guys tremendously. It's just a shame someone has to lose.