	products recent interviews FastScripts archive about ASAP Sports

Our Clients:

Browse by Sport

Find us on

Subscribe to RSS

Click to go to
Asaptext.com

View our
e-Brochure

MLB WORLD SERIES: CARDINALS v TIGERS

October 27, 2006

Jim Leyland

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: Game Five

JIM LEYLAND: First of all, I want to thank Phyllis for everything you've done. You've been good throughout the entire postseason. I enjoyed to work with you.
PHYLLIS MERHIGE: It was a real pleasure.
JIM LEYLAND: I want to say, first of all, to the St. Louis Cardinals, they deserved it, they earned it, congratulations to my good friend Walt Jocketty, and my friend Tony La Russa and all the players I know. They are good. They deserved it and quite frankly, we just didn't do things that were conducive to winning a World Series. I just only hope that nobody forgets the job that we did, the players I'm talking about, to go from 71 wins to the World Series. I just hope that nobody just totally writes us off that we're not a good team, because we are. We played very well in the postseason until this World Series. And we have no excuses.
We got beat by a team that played a lot better than we did during the course of the series.

Q. You're very gracious in losing. You've been a winner. Miraculous job from last year, congratulations. The way it was played, everything went our way. I want you to tell Andy Van Slyke that he's part of your team, and we'll see you in the World Series again.
JIM LEYLAND: (No response).

Q. Despite the obviously disappointing ending here, can you put into perspective what your club has accomplished over the course of the season?
JIM LEYLAND: I'm awfully proud of the organization, and what we're able to accomplish. Like I said, to go from where we did to where we are today, which is -- we lost the World Series, I certainly don't consider this a losing situation, but we did lose the World Series, but we made a lot of progress and we're a team that we're going to have to make a few changes.
If you want to continue to get better you've got to make progress in those areas and hopefully we can get back, and that's not going to be easy, because the American League has a lot of very good teams and we were very proud. I'm a little embarrassed we didn't represent it a little better, but we were very proud to represent the American League.

Q. Was it just coincide, Jim, can you place any kind of explanation on the fact that the fielding was so ragged here --
JIM LEYLAND: It was my fault. We worked at it all spring and we haven't worked on it since until we had that week off. We did a pretty good job all year long. We had the week off so we had to put some drills in. One of our drills was PFP, so obviously I should have left well enough alone. I'm being facetious, obviously, but that's how it worked out. In the American League you don't handle a lot of bunts and stuff. We knew we were going to do that this series, so we worked on it during the time frame we were off and quite frankly we didn't execute it during the World Series.
But there were so many things that went on in the series that, like I say, they just weren't feasible to win the series. And I'm responsible and I accept that responsibility. It's my job to have my team ready. We just didn't do enough things. But to me that responsibility falls on the manager.

Q. There were some physical errors, and maybe a couple of mental errors. Do you think the layoff had your team rusty or did you think the big stage had them nervous or was there a combination of the two?
JIM LEYLAND: Like I said before, I make no excuse. We didn't play well enough. There's no excuse here. I don't really know what the reasons were. But I will say this, I think that you have to credit Dave Duncan and the Cardinal pitching staff. They probably did the best job of anybody all year of pitching to us. And they really hadn't seen us that much. They did a tremendous job.
PHYLLIS MERHIGE: Thank you very much for coming in. Thanks for everything.
End of FastScripts

ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297