AL DIVISION SERIES: INDIANS v MARINERS

October 11, 2001

Lou Piniella

LOU PINIELLA: Yeah, vintage Jamie is right. He gave us five plus innings or 6 plus innings -- he gave us 6 innings, actually. We wanted to keep his pitch count low, just in case he has to come back on three days rest, on Monday, back here. But he gave us exactly what we needed, six good innings of baseball. And tonight or this afternoon we got our offense on track. We got a 2-run homer there by Cameron to get us started. Edgar added another one. And we got the crowd into the game, which we weren't able to do the other day. So it was a good win for us. Now we go to Cleveland, series is tied 1 and 1. And it gives us a chance to end it there or bring it back here. So we'll see.

LOU PINIELLA: Well, you know, he works on hitters' timing. And that's what makes him successful. He's not a power pitcher, obviously. But there's different ways to skin a cat. And he does it the sly way. But he does pitch inside, and he uses both sides of the plate, he changes speeds. And he's got good command on his pitches. He doesn't beat himself by walking hitters, he stays ahead in the count, and he pitches to our strengths. He allows us to put good defense behind him. He's a professional pitcher.

LOU PINIELLA: Well, we've got a good group of professional players in there. There's no -- you don't win 116 games. These guys go hard every day, and they're confident. And today was -- I tell you what, it was as close to a must win as you want. And we came out and pitched well and hit well and played good defense and the bullpen came in and held the lead. It's been our formula all year. But it's a resilient group of young men. There's a lot of confidence in that clubhouse. I think it shows. After a loss, we come out and try to get it done as much as possible, and we're fortunate today that we did.

LOU PINIELLA: It was as close to a must win game as you want it to be. You don't want to lose two ballgames at home and go to your opponent's ballpark and have to win two and come back here. We've tied the series now. I'm sure Cleveland is happy with their split. Obviously we are, because we lost the first one. We're very capable of going to Cleveland and playing good baseball and winning this thing. And Cleveland is a very capable club, also. The series is tied, now it's down to 2 out of 3, for either team.

LOU PINIELLA: Ichiro just missed a home run, but he got on a few times. And Sasaki really threw the ball well. He had the splitfinger. In September he didn't have as good a splitfinger. And he told our pitching coach that he had found it again. So it was good to see him go out there and throw the ball hard and at the same time have that good splitfinger, he gets hitters out with.

LOU PINIELLA: He won 20 games for the first time, I think the oldest pitcher ever in Major League Baseball to win 20 games for the first time. It goes to show you that he's had a lot of perseverance in his career. He's had -- he's had some adversity that he's overcome. He's gotten better and better with experience. And his type of pitcher basically is not going to be the overpowering type. So he uses guile and he uses -- he pitches to both sides of the plate. This type of pitcher could pitch for a while, assuming he stays healthy.

LOU PINIELLA: No, we leave that up to him. He's gotten 244 hits. And the more I stay out of that situation the better (laughter).

LOU PINIELLA: I guess it gets your juices flowing more. At the same time it gets the crowd in the game, gets the guys excited. And you're not in a situation where you're playing catchup ball. You know, we scored all our runs today on home runs. But when you get ahead, and if you get situations, you can take more chances offensively, which we didn't really have the opportunities to do. But when you jump out like that, you can do a lot more things during the course of the ballgame to add runs. It didn't happen that way, but at least you have that opportunity. But for sure it gets the crowd into the game, which the other night it wasn't. It was a fairly quiet crowd the whole ballgame.

LOU PINIELLA: No, I knew we'd come out and play well. You can't assure yourself or anybody else for that matter that you're going to win a ballgame. You can't assure yourself that you're going to win a series. But I knew we would play good baseball. The first game, their pitcher dominated. Today our starting pitcher and our bullpen dominated in a different way. But at the same time the results were the same. So we'll go out and play good ball in Cleveland. And hopefully things will go our way.