NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: BRAVES v DIAMONDBACKS

October 17, 2001

Bobby Cox

BOBBY COX: Not yet. We're going to play it game to game, and I can't even tell you what would sway me. He certainly can. He's ready to go. I think he threw -- we don't count intentional walks and pitchouts on those pitch counts so he was under 90 really. In his last start I think he was under 90. He's had six days rest going in, so he'll be ready. You bet.

BOBBY COX: I can't say it's a surprise that he's pitched well, but when you see his name in a lot of the categories, leading in pitching, that's probably a little bit of a surprise maybe. But at the end of the season last year, you know, we were after Alex Rodriguez a little bit and Mike Hampton. We were trying to sign some free agents during the wintertime. All of our players said absolutely to the one, "Let's go with Burkett and sign Rodriguez." They wanted a hitter. We have a lot of confidence in Burkett going into the season. Unfortunately we didn't get him a lot of runs. He could have easily been a 15 -, 20-game winner with some run support but he was the guy that didn't get them. To see him up there in strikeouts and ERA and all that is pretty phenomenal.

BOBBY COX: Yeah, we've got him in there. After the game last night, he said he feels great. He's ready to go. We can't wait to get him four at-bats instead of just one and see if he can't make a difference in our run support. Bako's done a good job, don't get me wrong, but Javy's been the No. 1 guy for a long time. Got a chance to really hit the ball out of the ballpark.

BOBBY COX: I don't know. I've tried to answer that forever and I still don't know. Probably if you're winning, you're a player's manager (laughter). If you're losing, they don't like you too much.

BOBBY COX: Well, we saw him once for sure, I can't remember if we saw him a different time this year, but I know we saw him the one time. He pitched good against us. What I remember in Montreal, he was a power guy, threw the ball awfully hard out of the strike zone, was a little bit wild. The time we saw him, he was a pitcher. Somebody's done a real good job with him of making him pitch. They've harnessed all that stuff. He's completely different than he was in Montreal.

BOBBY COX: I don't think so. Any time you're in post-season you're facing basically a real good pitcher every ball game. You go through Seattle and the Yankees and St. Louis, all those guys have good pitching, as well as us. He's beaten us several times in the last year or so. But we're swinging all right. We swung all right last night against a great pitcher. The ball's got to go your way a little bit. We had some near misses, but we feel like we have good pitching ourselves, and ball bounces our way, we can win.