AL DIVISION SERIES: RANGERS v YANKEES

October 7, 1999

Johny Oates

JOHNNY OATES: Well, that was certainly a key inning in the ball game. One of the key innings, in the fact that probably the best opportunity we had to have a nice inning, other than the first inning the first night here. And you get the guy 3 and 0, second and third and say you got a pretty good shot of getting something going. But he came back 3-1 and Mac seemed to think he chased two balls out of the strike zone to strike out. Clayton's got a good hitting count, 2 and 1 hits the ball to third. Rusty ends up chasing a 3-2 breaking ball in the dirt. We certainly had our opportunities. Andy made the pitches where he wanted to when he had to. Unfortunately we weren't able to capitalize.

JOHNNY OATES: I think we have a better chance of being successful swinging the bats like tonight. We had more hits, we probably made a -- I'm not sure we made more outs on pitches out of the strike zone, but I know that we looked like we had a chance to do something with the baseball. And I thought we had our opportunities tonight. We got some hits -- we got some hits early and we just weren't able to back it up. You look at the six guys in the middle of the line up, they all got the hits but it seemed like they got them in different innings, we weren't able to bunch them.

JOHNNY OATES: First of all, I think the first night the game was, believe it or not, in my heart I believed it was a lot closer than the 8-0 score. We made two defensive scores in one pitch, it's a one-nothing game at that point rather than 8-nothing. That doesn't do us any good to hammer on that now. But, yeah, I think there's a different amount of frustration, maybe, and we know that in our hearts we can play with these guys, but until we start doing it, there's always going to be doubt.

JOHNNY OATES: No, I knew at the beginning of the inning you felt how deep -- I knew when the inning started that if it got down to Ledee, a left-hander was not going to face him. I didn't bother to get a left hander up. I said if it comes up, there's going to be a right hander face him because I'm not having Leyritz or Curtis come up in a tied ball game. Bosman went out, I made the decision that I thought Rick was the best matchup for the left-hand hitter at that point. It does me no good to talk about it now, but if Rick had gotten Ledee out, Crabtree was coming into the ball game at a tied ball game. I felt that was a good matchup.

JOHNNY OATES: Just a guy that had more than one pitch. Crabtree can strike out double play more than Rick. Rick had pitched Ledee pretty good up to that point. Just one of those things that you go one route and that's it.

JOHNNY OATES: I'm going to have to sleep on that for a while. I don't know. We just got through finishing this one. I have some time to think about it. If I were a guessing man -- we've been pretty good against right-handed pitching with what we call our normal line-up, which was much like last night.

JOHNNY OATES: I haven't asked them about it yet, but it looked like Bobby backed off the ball a little bit. I think if Bobby keeps going -- Bobby had a chance to catch the ball if he keeps going after it. But, again, those are things you run into -- they played a lot together this year. But when you don't play together every night, that's certainly a possibility.

JOHNNY OATES: Yeah, I think we hit some balls with some authority tonight. We hit a few line drives. Juan hit the home run. We still got a couple of guys that look a little tentative at the plate. We'd like to get a little more aggressive there. But I think we have a better chance of scoring runs swinging the bats the way we did tonight as opposed to the way we did the night before last.