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AL DIVISION SERIES: ANGELS v RED SOX

October 7, 2007

Mike Scioscia

ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA: Game Three

MIKE SCIOSCIA: Before we start I'd like to congratulate the Red Sox. They played a terrific series, and they obviously deserve to move on. They're a great ball club and we just couldn't match up with them, and they played great baseball and took it to us. So congratulations to the Red Sox.

Q. Can you talk about Schilling and the rest of the Red Sox starters in this series?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: Well, they pitched well. They pitched well all season to get here. Their bullpen took kind of some different routes during the season, but they did a great job in this series and did a great job all season.
Their pitching probably doesn't get as much notice as some of the guys on the offensive side of that team. That's the heartbeat of that club, and they pitched well this series.

Q. Mike, why wasn't Casey in the lineup today? And, secondly, how much of an effort will be made during the off-season for the team to acquire some extra power?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: Well, Casey, we talked about before, Casey wasn't available today. So he wasn't in the lineup.
Every year you try to improve. There's not an off-season that goes by where you're not trying to improve your team, whatever the area might be. One of our issues has been slugging percentage, driving the ball, home run power. We still managed to score a lot of runs this year without that.
And if it can be improved, obviously we'll know that Bill and Art will look into it. But I think although this series we didn't swing the bats at times this year, even without home runs, we were scoring a lot of runs, and it just didn't appear in this series.

Q. How significant do you think the third inning was today when you guys had a good shot? Six line drives off Schilling in the first three innings?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: It's one of those games where you score one run and it's a 9-1 game, and you sit back and analyze. It was a lot closer ball game than that. We had some opportunities early. We couldn't cash in. They had an opportunity early. I thought Jered Weaver did a terrific job pitching in second and third nobody-out situation early. Both pitchers pitched out of jams.
Early on the game was tight either way. It was probably hinging on one hit one way or the other. The 8th inning they broke it open and didn't really make much of a game of it. But I think early on, especially with the bases loaded, situation early, Curt made some good pitches and got out of it.

Q. You could make an argument this is one of the Angels most talented clubs probably in franchise history this year. Do you feel a little snake bit the way that the season kind of unraveled on you a little bit with the injuries and so forth, even the timing today having to take Garret out in the middle of the game? And that's the first question. And the second one was, did he have trouble seeing that ball in the 1st inning? Looked like he got a late jump on it.
MIKE SCIOSCIA: Garret did not see the ball in the outfield today. I think his eye obviously got very sensitive looking up at the light into the sun. And it was really going to be tough for him to pick the ball up off the bat and at the plate. I think the brightness affected him a little bit. And you can't take a chance like that if you're not seeing the ball as clearly as you need to. Up until now he'd been fine with that. But whether it was a day game or whatever, he had trouble picking the ball up. And that obviously changed some things.
I thought our team was very talented. I thought it was deep. I thought it was deeper at some times during the season and we played at a much higher level at times during the season.
But we couldn't get anything going in these playoffs. As disappointing as this is in this series, you have to look back and see what a terrific season we had to get to this point. I think our young guys played great baseball when we needed them to establish depth. And unfortunately for us we couldn't carry our offense into this series. And part of it is what they did on the mound. They pitched great baseball and that was pretty much the story.

Q. You said earlier in the series about it's trouble dealing with Manny and David, you gotta pick your poison. Watching them out there, did it seem to you like they're feeding off one another, David hits the home run, Manny follows it up with the blast?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: Well, I don't know if they feed off each other. They're trying to hit the ball every time up there up at the plate whether the guy in front of them made an out or what happened.
But there's as good a 1-2 punch there is in baseball. I think some of the mistakes that Jered made, and there weren't many today, but he made a couple of them in that inning to Ortiz, he didn't get the fastball quite in the zone he wanted to. And with Manny, he left a breaking ball up into the zone throwing a 3-2 count and Manny didn't miss it.
So there weren't many mistakes. I thought Jered did a terrific job out there. But the couple mistakes he made they didn't miss in that one inning.

Q. A healthy Matthews, if Matthews could play, Anderson being healthy, Kotchman being healthy, and maybe Rivera being more healthy than he was, could that have made a difference in the series, bring those in healthy and play this thing again, would the series be different or better than it was?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: I think we probably would have had a chance to have a little more offensive continuity. But this series wasn't lost on injuries. And you have to look at the team you have and you have to be deep enough to keep moving forward and absorbing it.
A couple of these ball games, even with all the guys we haven't had in the lineup, we had chances to win. I think Game 2 was obviously a game where we pressured them and couldn't get the hit with guys in scoring position. Today's ball game up until the 8th inning, we had opportunities, even with all the guys that you mentioned.
It's part of any season, guys are going to get hurt. We got hit by some of ours at the wrong time. Some guys weren't swinging the bats like they can at the wrong time. That's baseball. You're not going to look back and make any excuses. They're not going to let us call them in a month or now when everybody is healthy and say, hey, let's play this series again. They beat us. It wasn't because of our health. Those guys went out there and beat us, and that's the bottom line.

Q. Did GA ask to come out or was that your decision?
MIKE SCIOSCIA: GA, he to come out. And he realized he couldn't go on. He's been battling this and has been able to play with it, been able to see the ball the way he needs to in play up until today. And I think that if you are having trouble seeing the ball off the bat it's one thing. If you're having problems seeing the ball in the batter's box, that's more disturbing. And I think we just -- it just was a day where GA wasn't going to be able to play.
ROB DOELGER: Thank you very much.

End of FastScripts

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