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AL DIVISION SERIES: ATHLETICS v TWINS

October 6, 2006

Ron Gardenhire

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA: Game Three

Q. Have you decided who is going to be your starting pitcher tomorrow?
RON GARDENHIRE: Yeah, Silva will start tomorrow. Even if Johan felt fine, it will be Silva tomorrow. And Johan will go Sunday. He is sore, normal soreness, but not normal soreness for a starting pitcher. And it's just one of those situations, I would never take a chance with him unless he is feeling really, really good, and he would want the ball tomorrow.
If we say you got it, he will take it. Not going to happen. We will go to Carlos.

Q. (Inaudible)?
RON GARDENHIRE: No, not going to happen. I am not going to risk this young man. I was actually preparing myself for this whole conversation so that's why I am answering this quick.

Q. Is there any chance he can talk you out of it?
RON GARDENHIRE: No. Just talking with him, the whole package, knowing what he threw on the mound out there. I went into the bullpen and he is sore. I mean, he has been sore for a while, you know, with his hip and his shoulder and his back, you know, back in the back here (indicating) and down through his knee. It's just been there, and that's because of all the innings he has pitched, and I'm not going to press the issue and let him pitch, and we have talked about that and it's just not the right thing to do.

Q. Same lineup?
RON GARDENHIRE: Yes, same lineup. Tyner is going to DH and Radke is pitching, and the rest of the guys are as-is.

Q. Will you have a quicker hook with Brad in this situation?
RON GARDENHIRE: I think I just got to play the game and see how it goes. You can't get behind too much here. You can't let the game get out of hand, so we will gauge it just like you would last game of the World Series, because it is the last game if we lose, so we have to play it, you know, as according, and we are going to try to do everything we can to win the baseball game, and we will let Radke go out there and hopefully it won't come to having to make a big decision early and jerk him out of there if it's not going good.
Hopefully he will go out there and do what we want him to do and that's throw the ball good.

Q. Haren dominated you as much as anyone this year. How do you feel going into today's game against him?
RON GARDENHIRE: Haren threw the ball very well, and I think that was the Liriano game, also, so there was a lot of sidebars with him throwing when Liriano threw the ball good for a couple innings, comes out of the ballgame, so I'm not taking anything away from what he did, he dominated us, he gets ahead in the count, and he eats you up with that splitter, and he did that very well to us last time, so I think we got some hits off him early in the year, I do believe, and he is a good pitcher. He has got great stuff.
Just like talk to some of our hitters and they will tell you, we have watched all the film on him, looked at all the numbers, and the counts, and where he is really successful at, but what counts, you have to play the game.
We have talked about trying to make pitchers work more, but if you are constantly behind 0-1, 0-2 on pitchers, so how do you attack them? We go out there and try to get a good pitch to hit, get a good swing on it, and see what happens.

Q. What things would make Carlos Silva successful against this team in Game 4?
RON GARDENHIRE: Carlos is going to attack the strike zone. The one thing he did this last outing against the White Sox, which is a very good lineup, and a good team, is he used a new little splitter changeup that he has got going, and that was good. He kept it down, he changed speeds and he located, and it made his sinker better, actually, throwing that pitch, and his sinker was diving pretty good.
As a matter of fact, Redmond and Joe Mauer, watching him, they thought that was probably one of the better games that he had movement. And they were watching the video in the back and one of them was catching him and -- I think it might have been Redmond catching him that day, but they were saying that's as good of movement as he has had in a while, and that's good stuff, we need to hear that.
He is a bulldog. He will go out there and give you everything he has, and I think he has learned a lot about things like that this year, so his heart is in the right place this year, and he is an attacker, and that's all we can go by.
He has got the history and, hopefully, he will go out there and attack. We just got to get him the ball. That would be good.

Q. (Inaudible)?
RON GARDENHIRE: Well, I think Carlos coming out of spring training, pitching the World games out of the bullpen, that started it off as being a little behind, as far as where he needed to be. Our spring manager set it up for all the different things Rick (Anderson) does with guys, and he missed some of that stuff and never really recovered from it.
Really, his sinker hasn't been the same this year, and that's due to just not being able to figure it out himself. You can sit there and say, well, he was in the bullpen, but that only lasts so long. He just really never had his good sinker this year, and it was probably due to arm speed or his release or something.
He tried a lot of different things but it just didn't work out for him. Pitchers go through that, just not his year. Balls that were hit at people last year were going through holes. Sometimes you just live with it, but what we need out of him now -- it doesn't matter what's happened in the past, you have to go out and get people out, and that's the way it is for all of our pitchers.

Q. Ron, what, if anything, do you tell these guys today before the game being down 0-2?
RON GARDENHIRE: I am going to use the Rudy stuff, stand up on the chair, and you got to fight, fight, fight, and if they hit you, knock you down, you got to get back up and go, go, go.
This team has been down. Honestly, we have been knocked around before, so these guys are in the clubhouse right now, they are pretty loose, and we are going to go out there and we are going to give them everything we have, just like we have all year long.
And I read a comment by Macha, "If you have to start telling these guys what they got to do now, it's probably a little late." Sure, I will say something pumping them up. I like the Rudy stuff that I do. But it's going out there, relaxing, and getting a couple big hits early, and if we do that, we will be okay.

End of FastScripts...

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