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WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC: ROUND ONEMarch 10, 2006Bill DaleJustin HuberPOOL D: ORLANDO, FLORIDA Q. How do you feel that you improved throughout the tournament? First game very shaky, second game didn't have a good offensive game, but played them tough, tonight was very close. COACH BILL DALE: Yeah, well I mean that first game we come out and I guess a lot of people said that's our best chance for a win. So maybe a few guys put a little pressure on themselves, fortunately for me I'm sitting back watching this, I didn't get a chance to play. But I thought that if you look at the Italian team, they got a lot of guys that played in the big leagues. And then you look at us and we got five or six, maybe. But we come after that night and we had a meeting, had the day off, so we had a meeting, and it was pretty much to go out and be very aggressive. And I guess in the last two days we have been aggressive at the plate. We really haven't shown a lot with hits last night. But tonight we came out, swung the bats, were aggressive, and we pitched well. Q. You leave 0-3 but you got to be a little encouraged? COACH BILL DALE: Yeah, we're playing the best in the world. A lot of people have written us off to say that we're hopeless. But we have gone out there and shown, minus the Italy game, that we can compete. That one play tonight where the ball drops in between the shortstop and left fielder, that changes the whole game. If that ball is caught, I mean, things like that happen, but if that ball is caught we're ahead right there at the end there, 4-3. Because they end up scoring three runs that inning. But those things happen. So we show we can compete and we have got, we have got the talent and I guess we work hard at what we do. We're not the guys that go out there and if we start to get beat just drop our heads. Australians are renowned for going out there and working hard, right through the entire tournament game, whatever you want to call it. Q. What's it going to take to get better by 2010, the next one? COACH BILL DALE: I guess us getting more guys playing and moving them up through the minor league system to get to the big leagues. I said before that a lot of the guys on the team are basically A-ball players. So we need to build that up and get these guys up higher up the ranks. Q. First, I wanted to ask you mostly about Cabrera, who you faced tonight as a pitcher, because it seems like his stuff compares favorably to anyone out there. Compared to who you faced in this tournament and who you have faced over your career, how does he compare? JUSTIN HUBER: It's tough to say because it's so easy in the season. Like all the guys we faced, I would like to face them all again in mid-season, but you don't face that kind of pitching every day in the big leagues either. So it's that kind of tournament. And it's great to have that opportunity to come out and match up against those guys, because as I said, you just don't get to face that type of pitcher every day. It was funny, actually, the last inning, you know, starting a new pitcher who was throwing 95, and we all looked at each other and said, oh, just another one of those Latin pitchers that are throwing 95. So it was really funny. Q. Yesterday Jon had spoken about how you guys had trouble with the guys that threw that hard. Over the course of the tournament, do you feel that the team, because you got to see it more and more, that that was the reason you were able to put some runs on the board? JUSTIN HUBER: That's the game. You make adjustments as you go along. That's the good players that do that. And I think we got a lot of good players, and if we would have faced those guys every day, you know, it's only natural that you're going to get better at hitting those guys. I think the encouraging thing is that we have come out of this tournament, I think, with a little bit more respect than what we had in the past. And that was really I think our aim and our goal was to really battle for some recognition in the game, because it's a serious sport back home, and although it doesn't get a whole lot of publicity back home and not very respected back home, we have got a lot of guys, we got over a hundred now, guys. You know, so I think it's, you know, our aim was to sort of, as I said, make it sort of world known and well known to be a serious game in our country.
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