AL DIVISION SERIES: INDIANS v MARINERS

October 15, 2001

Lou Piniella

LOU PINIELLA: I said all along that that wouldn't be a burden for us postseason. Postseason is just a completely different situation from the regular season. All the teams that qualify are all capable of winning, and that's the way to approach it. And that's exactly the way we approach it as a team.

LOU PINIELLA: It happens. It really does. You get to the Final 8, and they're all good baseball teams. I'd like to congratulate Cleveland on how they played. They played well this series. This game here, you couldn't ask for a better ballgame. But anything can happen in postseason. You can have an outstanding year and all of a sudden you get an injury here or a bad break there, and it turns the whole thing around. And when you get to the Final 8 all these teams are good, solid baseball teams. They all can beat you. And I knew coming in here that this division, the battle against Cleveland was going to be much tougher for us than the Chicago series this year, and not because -- Chicago had a bunch of talent, but they hadn't been there before. This is a playoff-tested bunch of veterans, and they played like it. It was a heck of a playoff, and we're fortunate to come out on top.

LOU PINIELLA: You always, in the back of your mind your squander opportunities, and basically it allows the other team to stay in the ballgame and come back at you. But our pitching today was really, really solid. It started with Jamie and then the contrast with Nelson. I think necessarily I threw the ball as well as I've seen him in a long, long time. He's done a very fine job all year, but today he was exceptional. And Rhodes gets a big out and Sasaki comes in and gets 2, 3, 4, right in the middle part of their line-up, not an easy save.

LOU PINIELLA: Well, when you win 116 ballgames in the course of the year, during the course of a baseball season, you can play under any type of situation basically. We rely on pitching and solid defense. That's a constant, almost every day. And it's a good formula. Today if we could have broken the game open a few times, it would have made things much easier for us. But at the same time Cleveland has a pretty darn good bullpen. They kept talking about our bullpen, and our bullpen is good, no question about it. But Cleveland, they've got good arms that throw the ball, and you've got to give them credit. But this is fun. This is not pressure, it really isn't. It might seem like if you put me on a deadline to write a story, that would be pressure (laughter.)

LOU PINIELLA: I'm not used to that. But we do this every day for a living, so it's fun for us. This is what we go to Spring Training for. This is why we play an entire season to get to this situation. And I said it after we got beat in Cleveland 17-2, we're going to come out and play well tomorrow, hopefully we'll get Cleveland to come to Seattle with us, and we'll play a good game the final day. And you're never guaranteed or assured of anything. But if you go out and play hard like we did, good things can happen. And that's exactly what happened the last couple of days.

LOU PINIELLA: You know, Cleveland has got some really good fastball hitters. And unless you can throw the ball up there 93, 94, 95 miles an hour, you're going to have problems. But good fastball hitters invariably are a little more susceptible to the off-speed stuff. And Jamie exploited that exceptionally well. And he made some good pitches. He didn't stay -- I saw quite a few of them. And when I went over and looked at them on film, and they weren't centered. These pitches were out on the corners. And Jamie can do that because he's got such good command.

LOU PINIELLA: The important thing with almost any club in postseason is to shut down the first few hitters in the line-up. If you can do that, now you can concentrate a heck of a lot more and take a few more liberties with the power part of it. So our objective was to keep Lofton and Vizquel off the bases as much as possible. You can see in the game where we really got beat up. They did a lot of damage out of the first two holes. And now you get the guys that are paid to get the drives and runs, and they have a lot of them that do it well.

LOU PINIELLA: For us?

LOU PINIELLA: Our game plan was, believe it or not if Ichiro got on base in the first inning, was to bunt him over and attempt to steal third. And that was preplanned.

LOU PINIELLA: That one there wasn't planned.