AL DIVISION SERIES: ATHLETICS v YANKEES

October 12, 2001

Mike Mussina

MIKE MUSSINA: Well, my home is not California, so I played three years in college here and enjoyed it immensely. It's somewhat like a home game, I would suppose, but being in the American League for 11 years now you get back here a couple of times a year, and I've had some decent games here. So I'm not concerned about it being a road game. I've pitched on the road for a long time.

MIKE MUSSINA: I believe so, yes.

MIKE MUSSINA: Whichever team you're playing for, if you're faced with an elimination game it's the biggest game you've pitched. After tomorrow, yeah, it will probably be the biggest game I've pitched. But we have to -- We have to go out there and play like it's one ballgame. We can't concern ourselves with the fact that three hours after it starts it might be over. We're going out to play like it's one ballgame, and play our best game and when it's over, hopefully we're still standing.

MIKE MUSSINA: Well, I think some of us aren't even looking at it as three games, I think we're looking at it as one game. I can be as cliche as anybody wants me to be, but we can only concentrate on one game at a time. We've got to worry about tomorrow and hope Sunday is still there when tomorrow is over, and that's the approach you have to take or you start pushing yourself or asking for things you can't deliver. In a 24-hour period we're not going to win three games, we're only going to win one.

MIKE MUSSINA: I have no idea. I'm going to pitch like I've been pitching all year, and try to take it as any other game. If I walk out there thinking about all the ramifications if I don't pitch well, then I'm not going to pitch well. Just go out there and pitch like it's a game in the middle of July and try to pitch the best game I possibly can. There's nothing else I can ask from myself or expect from myself except the best I can possibly put out there, so hopefully that's what we'll get.

MIKE MUSSINA: Well, I think we actually pitched pretty well. I think they're obviously a talented club. They put up a lot of runs. They haven't lost a home game in a long time. They're something like 40 games over 500 since the All-Star break. Their line-up is tough, and I think we pitched pretty well up to this point. We hope we can go out and play as well tomorrow, maybe throw up a few runs and take our chances. But they have the ability to hammer out a lot of runs and we need to hold them down, like we have for basically most of the first two games.

MIKE MUSSINA: Well, I think when we all go to work in February in Florida and in Arizona, anybody on all 30 clubs, all they want to do is still be playing come October. And I felt that New York had as good a chance if not better than anybody to still be playing in October. So that was a big factor in why I went to New York. And here we are. So this is why I wanted to come to New York and get a chance to win a championship, and we're going to go out and see if we can still pull it off.

MIKE MUSSINA: I'm sure the team experience factors into it. Everybody is looking for panic or something because they're defending champions, and I don't see any of that. We play a ballgame and if we don't win it, then you go home, you get up the next day and you try to win the next game. We know we have to win a few games in a row, here, but it's only one game every day. So we have to go out and try to win one right now.

MIKE MUSSINA: I don't think anybody has thought about that really. Yeah, we know that there's some people that may not be here next year, but I don't think anybody has sat down and thought about it. We think we're still going to be playing after the next couple of days, so we're going to take that attitude out there and try to play a good ballgame.

MIKE MUSSINA: No, I don't try to change anything. It's going to be tough to see on some parts of the field. There's no question about that. It may be tough to hit. It's going to certainly be tough in the outfield. But you just keep pitching the way I've been pitching. I'm not going to try to change the game plan because the game is at 4:30 local time instead of at night.

MIKE MUSSINA: No, I don't think so. I think everybody that puts on this uniform feels like we're representing an organization that's done a lot in the past, but we're still trying to prove something today. So if I sit there and think about what everybody has accomplished before us, then you're not really thinking about baseball, and I'm not the type of person to do that. We're trying to win this one game, and after that we'll try to win one more game and so on. So I'm not sitting back thinking about what Whitey would do in this circumstance. I'm thinking about what I'm going to do.

MIKE MUSSINA: Well, it was asked before, and I have been in elimination games before, and I think the last six weeks or so I've thrown the ball pretty well. So I'm not worrying about what's going to happen if it doesn't work out, because I feel pretty good about the way I've been throwing the ball lately. And I think I'm going to be able to take that back out there tomorrow. So I don't see why I wouldn't be able to and I'm hoping it turns out the way the last six weeks of my season has turned out.