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MLB WINTER MEETINGSDecember 4, 2007Bob GerenNASHVILLE, TENNESSEE Q. First off, can you provide any sort of update on the various recoveries of your various injury guys? BOB GEREN: I spoke to all of them quite a bit, and we have -- every week the trainers and strength coaches are getting reports on all the players. Rotating them every other week between position players and pitchers, and I get e-mails every week on what happened with the group. I spoke with the majority of the guys once a month, every couple weeks. I've seen a few of them at various occasions. Saw a lot of them at Joe Kennedy service. I've had pretty good contact with most of them. Q. Can you run them down specifically? BOB GEREN: Go around the horn? Q. Go down the roster. BOB GEREN: The first baseman is doing fine. Nothing going on there. Ellis, healthy, he's fine. Crosby is actually on his honeymoon right now. He swung the bat and his wrists and everything felt good before he left. Chavy is recovering from a couple different surgeries, actually three, and feels actually quite well. He's getting rehabbed in Scottsdale so he's working hard just about every day on that. The outfield, Travis Buck, talked to him the other day on his birthday. He's doing very well. The elbow bone chips were removed. He's doing the workout. Q. Any baseball activities? BOB GEREN: He hasn't thrown yet. Just doing strengthening. He was getting close to it. Q. How about Chavy? How far away is he from any sort of baseball activities? BOB GEREN: I couldn't give you an exact date on that. His is obviously complicated because it's more than one thing. He's rehabbing. Who am I missing here? Crosby is doing well. He had a jump-start on the off-season by shutting it down at the end of the year. He's strong, doing well. Missed him the other day, called and left a message. It's actually his birthday, too. Off-season, lot of birthdays, Mike. Talked to Swish about a week ago. Closing on a house up there. Doing a Christmas thing for the team in the area. On the December 11th and 12th we're having lot of guys fly into Phoenix to kind of test them in certain ways with doctors and strength coaches and trainers, everybody there to kind of assess people, where they're at in their off-season, what adjustments they need the make. Q. Is that everybody? BOB GEREN: No, it's about 15 and 18 different guys. Guys that we're targeting that either recovering from something or -- Q. Does that include every one of the guys that you mentioned? BOB GEREN: Yes. Q. Crosby and Chavez and -- BOB GEREN: Duchscherer is doing well. I didn't get to the pitchers. Duchscherer is doing extremely well. I discussed the possibility of him being in the starting rotation and kind of asked him health-wise if he thinks that would actually be more beneficial to him, knowing when he's going to pitch as opposed to being a reliever, the strength -- the strains on the body are different starting and relieving. I kind of wanted to get his opinion on how he felt about it, how he was doing. He felt that being the starter, knowing exactly when you're going to pitch, having time to recover between outings would be something he was interested in pursuing. We're looking at that as a pretty good possibility. Q. Has he thrown at all? BOB GEREN: Not yet. Q. What was his injury? BOB GEREN: He had a hip surgery. I don't know exactly what it's called. Kind of socket had some growth, spurring, something like that. Cleaned it off, similar to -- Q. What about -- you said he's not started throwing? BOB GEREN: I don't believe he's thrown yet. Q. What about Rich? BOB GEREN: Haven't spoke to Rich. He was on vacation in New Mexico. He's back in town now, getting regular strengthening work in the shoulder and things like that. Throwing program should be starting right about now, actually. Most of the guys start their throwing in first part of December. Q. What's your rotation like? BOB GEREN: Harden, Gaudin. Starting tomorrow, possibly Duchscherer if everything went well for him. What order I don't know. Q. Duchscherer would be -- BOB GEREN: Strong consideration. He comes in and goes through the process as a starter and doesn't have any setbacks and performs well, you know. Q. I assume there's teams interested in Haren. I know you won't trade him unless you get a big time offer. But, do you start thinking about Plan B in case he does get traded? When do you start doing that? BOB GEREN: Well, lot of the rumors around him and Blanton are really just that. I think it's a little bit more speculation and it's hard to comment on that type speculation from my standpoint. Billy has addressed the media earlier, the local media anyway. Spent a lot of time on that subject. That's just something that's always a possibility. Not too concerned about it right now. Q. One of Ken's frequent complaints when he was manager was that he was -- didn't feel like he was in the loop of events like this, various talks. Is it fair to assume given your relationship with Billy that you are in the loop? BOB GEREN: I'm not comparing to any previous managers. I don't know exactly what the situation was. Him and David, consistently update what's going on. It would be fair to say that. Q. Having guys come in to Phoenix, is that something that the organization hasn't done before? BOB GEREN: It's new. It's something that you look back on your playing season we had last year and just trying to constantly improve the situation. I thought that would be -- hate to have guys come in, the first time you see them is later. It's nice to make sure your guys are at the workout. We want them. Body composition, we want them. Workout plan that we had for them in the off-season is working and do we need to do more. It's new since I've been here. I don't know if they've done it many years ago. Q. It's kind of a direct result of we got all these injuries, let's see if we can -- BOB GEREN: Trying to make improvement as far as the organization? Q. Do they ask you for your input on trade talk? Do you lobby for keeping Haren or Blanton? Don't break up my rotation or anything like that? BOB GEREN: No. You mean do I lobby for anything? Q. You could pull for a guy. You could recommend. BOB GEREN: I just think that Billy has been doing this a long time, and I have full confidence in his ability to run the organization and I just -- I'm here, and if they ask me certain questions, I give them my honest answers, but I don't necessarily try to lobby one way or another. I have complete confidence in our front office and our whole organization. Q. Bullpen management is such a huge part of the game today. I mean, it's becoming more apparent every year. BOB GEREN: Bullpen management? Q. With pitchers, relief pitchers, their value keeps going up and going up. Do you feel that it's more important to have guys that can mix and match certain match-ups, or is your optimum to try to establish your 7th, 8th, 9th as quickly as you can? To get those 6, 7, 8 guys to know their roles and be comfortable, or are you more of the opinion that you can mix and match and it doesn't matter who your seven, eight guys are as long as you have a strong closer? BOB GEREN: Well, listening to that question, to be honest with you, I think the 8th inning and 7th inning can be just as high a leveraged situation as the 9th inning. Sometimes the 8th I think is higher than the 9th. It has a little mental side to being in the 9th. Some people will make the argument you have to have something special inside to pitch in the 9th inning. I've seen a lot of 8th innings that were just as important as the 9th. Last year with Huston Street injured for awhile and Duchie was injured almost the whole year, Alan Embree was more of coming in as a 6th, 7th inning to get to Duchie and Street, he ended up leading the team in saves. So if a guy can pitch any of those innings, makes it more valuable. Q. But, I mean, do you make -- BOB GEREN: It changed all the time last year. Now you have a 7th and 8th and now you're back to 6th. Q. Would you prefer to have -- if you could, would you prefer to have guys slated in slots? BOB GEREN: You do have them in those roles. They tend to change sometimes. Sure, preferably you have a nice set lineup that plays every day, perfect rotation or bullpen, yeah. Make it easy, but doesn't happen in today's world. Q. Are you going to be there on the 11th and 12th? BOB GEREN: Yes. Q. Because of the way Embree pitched last year, is that one of the reasons to make it easier to move people? BOB GEREN: Definitely emergence of a couple young guys we brought up, Brown, makes it easier, sure. Q. Most teams just try to struggle to find five starting pitchers. Can you imagine a 6-man rotation -- do you think that could work for some teams? BOB GEREN: I think there's enough days off now it's not really necessary unless you wanted to possibly stretch their pitch count out even higher. I mean, I look more at four-man. I like to see that it way. Never really considered 6. There's lot of stretches in the season when the dates off come in. Just right that you only need four. Q. What's the biggest key to keeping your bullpen fresh for the year? BOB GEREN: Monitoring their innings, their back-to-back days, their pitches. Kind of have little guidelines that I was taught real young as a manager in the A-ball and rookie ball levels that actually worked pretty well. Q. Like what? BOB GEREN: Never let a guy go three days in a row. Q. Never pitch him more than three days in row? BOB GEREN: Try not to. It can be done. It can be done, but two innings, try to give him the next day off. One inning can go again. Little guidelines that you kind of keep in the back of your mind that work keeping young, right out of college, high school, people safe and it tends to work all the way through, but, you know, at the Major League level it's a little different. You take a lot into what a pitcher will tell you. I can ask Allen Embree, "Can you pitch today?" It wouldn't matter if he pitched three, four, five. He'll tell me the truth. He knows his body. Others you have to monitor differently because they don't really know. Q. What about with the price of relief pitchers going up and the instability of training five, six guys in the bullpen? Do you think there's going to be a new emphasis on starting pitchers going longer? Well, if you can get them to go six. Is it going to get to a point the only way to fix a bullpen is start having starters go seven and eight innings again? Right now -- BOB GEREN: Everybody wants to do that. It's just a matter you try to make that happen without -- just by being more efficient, usually. That goes down to throwing strikes and your defense making all the plays for them, not giving any extra outs, keeping the walks down. It all sounds real simple. Q. Are there any guys that have proven -- I would imagine Haren is one of them, given his work ethic -- from the 15, 18 guys you're bringing together, you don't have to worry about it this off-season? BOB GEREN: I don't think he's on there. Q. Are there any other guys that you just know -- BOB GEREN: Guys that were completely healthy aren't going, yeah. It's not a life-time exemption or anything, PGA Tour. Q. This isn't a punishment? BOB GEREN: No. No, not at all. Q. Are there any guys that weren't injured last year that you're going to bring in just to -- might be concerns about how hard they worked, maybe came into camp last spring a little heavier than you would like, anybody like that? I'm not asking you to name names. BOB GEREN: That's a possibility. Monitoring weight, body composition, injuries. Flexibility, even. Q. I'm not mentioning any names. BOB GEREN: Okay. Q. I'm surprised more teams don't do that. BOB GEREN: Well, lot of our guys actually live in the area, and we've had a tendency over a lot of them come to Spring Training. Really so nice down there. Our complex has everything they need to work out. And so we see a lot of them early anyway. This is just a chance -- then we see them before the season starts. It gives us one more opportunity in the middle of December, see them in January and then February. Q. Harden will be there? BOB GEREN: Yes. He's there now. Q. How do you see him in terms of health for the first week of the season? BOB GEREN: How do I see him? Q. Are there any issues that you are worrying about? BOB GEREN: I'm not anticipating any issues. I mean, he had a touch of tendinitis at the end of the season. He's building himself back up to start at the end, and we decided to just not do it. He went to Instructional League. He worked with Ron Roman. He had a nice throwing program for him. I was actually down there and saw that. He was feeling excellent, getting out there a good distance. Arm felt good. Time to give him a regular, you know, month, month and a half off and started throwing. Q. Is there anybody among the guys that were hurt that you were not comfortable saying they'll be ready to go when Spring Training opens? BOB GEREN: At this point, I'm pretty comfortable. It's possible Eric could be a little bit behind because of multiple surgeries. I'm not saying he won't be. I'm hoping that he'll be ready to go on opening day. Little bit earlier. Twenty-fifth? Is that right? Twenty-fifth, yeah. Q. When do you get rolling for pitchers and catchers? BOB GEREN: We're moving it open. Report on the 13th and the first work out is the 14th. Position players, we'll have to try to -- there's not any games to play to really start much earlier. What we have to try to do is add a couple at bats here and there to get their at-bat totals up before that first game. I was looking at that. It would be a matter of giving them more at bats, five innings. We'll have to play a few more innings in the field to get another at bat or maybe a less off day once in a while, give them a DH or something. If they need to use the minor league complex to get a few more at bats. That's fine. Their bodies are fine. Usually by that point in I think Spring Training everybody is itching to go. Q. Thirteenth, isn't really that early for you guys. BOB GEREN: To start? Q. Yes. BOB GEREN: I'm talking about the position players being ready by -- Q. Even for the pitchers, bring them in earlier. BOB GEREN: Really, you're only talking about your number one and your starters. That's all you're really concerned about. Your number one and two starter, you need to make sure they're built up to that point. You know, last year you look at Haren and Blanton and look what they did last off-season. They were ready. They're aware of it. Q. You won't need your number three until maybe the 30th. BOB GEREN: Correct. Number one and two should start in Japan, start back home again. Three and four could pitch in relief. Q. You anticipate any issues that are going the arise by having to go to Japan? Teams have gone in the past, complained that slow starts and jetlag and throws everybody off. Any things that you're planning on as a manager to maybe -- BOB GEREN: I don't know the exact schedule the last teams that have done it. But our schedule is such that it's perfect. Because when we come home, we have an off day, then we play three exhibition games against the Giants. Then we have another off day before opening day. If there is any jetlag or player is tired, they have a few days to try to get that out of them. Q. How about the short games? BOB GEREN: I'm not sure of the official thing. I think they have added one. There's only two on the schedule, Saturday and Sunday and Monday off, open day Tuesday. Is that correct? I believe they're going to. Anytime you fly that far and you play, there's going to be some negatives to it, but the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. It's going to be a great experience. It's good to keep baseball all over the world. I know a lot of our players are looking forward to it. I am myself. Q. The Japanese fans are very excited about the season opening in Japan. What's your take on what kind performance can the fans expect from you? BOB GEREN: As far as the performance, first of all, we're going to be ready. We're playing the World Champions. Obviously everybody knows how good they are. We're going to be doing everything we can for Spring Training to be a hundred percent ready all the way across the board all the way for that series. My thoughts on it, I'm excited. I've never been to Japan. Our team was close to going four, five years ago and it was canceled. I was disappointed with that. Everybody I talk to is very excited about it. We wanted to go right from the beginning when they first asked the Players Association, whoever talked to our player rep, right off the bat they said yes. Everybody has been all for it. All games going to be in the Tokyo Dome, do you know? Q. Most of them. BOB GEREN: Four games. Q. I think they're all at the Dome. BOB GEREN: That's what I thought. Anybody been there? What did you think? Are you going to go again? Wouldn't miss it? End of FastScripts |
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