NL DIVISION SERIES: GIANTS v BRAVES

October 7, 2002

Rich Aurilia

RICH AURILIA: I don't think any of us slept as long as we normally would, but if you need to get more sleep for a game of this caliber today or your adrenaline is not pumping, something's wrong. I think we are all ready to play tonight. We are all excited. We have confidence in our starting pitcher and our team to go out there and do the job we know we can do.

RICH AURILIA: I think everybody was excited with the win yesterday and the way we won, especially facing elimination. But at the same time, I think everybody on the flight knew what was at hand today, and we all knew we needed to get our rest. It was a little more quiet than usual. You'd hope it would be, traveling in the wee hours of the morning. You don't want too many people talking. I think everybody got their rest and got their rest this morning, too.

RICH AURILIA: Thinking back, I think at the end of August, we had a seven-day road trip through Colorado and Arizona. Going into that last game in Arizona we were 6-0 and had just beat Johnson and Schilling. We finally had our team 100% healthy. Everybody was playing well. Granted, we lost that last game of that road trip in the ninth inning, but I felt like that was a road trip and a point that we really turned it around and started playing the type and caliber of baseball that we knew we could play. You know, the last five weeks of the season, every game was playoff caliber to us. We fought from a deficit, I think as in early September, I think we were four games back of L.A. for the wild-card and 11 back of Arizona and we fought really hard to get where we were by the end of the season to get in the post-season. I think that road trip was a turning point for us.

RICH AURILIA: I think it did. Every situation you're put in, you try and find something to work it to your advantage. We felt like we were basically on elimination through the last month of the season. We had to win almost all our games to win the wild-card by a few games. You know, to go out yesterday with the task at hand, either you have one more day left to play or you're going home; the pressure was on us and we performed well. Hopefully today we can come out and do the same thing. We know that we have been under pressure for a while now. Hopefully we can use that to our advantage with the games we played down the stretch. Atlanta really, I don't think -- they clinched pretty early. I don't think they had much of a pressure-packed September like we did playing meaningful games. Hopefully we can use that to our advantage.

RICH AURILIA: I think the guys around Barry are -- that hit around him. We expect him tonight to go out and have a big game just like we do every game. Sometimes it's not fair. You have the expectations of him going out every day and hitting a home run or getting three or four hits and that's not always going to happen. So you need the other guys in the lineup to pick up some of the slack. And I think so far this series, especially in the two games that we have won, we've done that. Guys in the top getting on base and the guys down on the bottom driving in some runs. Barry has actually hit the ball really well this series. Sometimes you can't tell by the numbers how a person is hitting the ball, but he's hit the ball well. Just like we have the past four games, we look forward to him going out and having a big night for us tonight.

RICH AURILIA: You know after you have just seen a guy three days ago or four days ago, it's a lot different than not seeing him for four or five months. Now we know what he throws. We know how he's probably going to try and approach us. And he's on three days' rest. I don't know how often he's thrown on three days' rest regardless of the amount of pitches he threw in the last game. You know, at least we know now what we are probably going to see. Going into Game 2, we had not seen him since, I guess it was May, and that was before he started really throwing the ball well. So at least now we can know a little bit more what to expect from him, and hopefully learn from our experience in Game 2.

RICH AURILIA: I think there's different types of pressures. What I mean by saying that the pressure we've had over the last five or six weeks of the season, that was a team thing. You know, we played some pressure-packed games. We faced some really tough pitching down the stretch, and we rose to that challenge as a team. We played well, our best baseball, probably, of all season. You go to an individual level, you know, pressure -- the more pressure you put on yourself, I think the worse you are going to perform. In 2000 I think when we lost in the Division Series, we were expected to go a lot further and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I know personally I learned a lot from that experience, don't try too hard and don't put extra added pressure on yourself and you'll probably perform better. I think everybody learned from that experience. We have a veteran ballclub. Tonight we are just going to go out and try and treat it just like we did yesterday and just like we did any game down the stretch.