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WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC POOL D: SAN JUANMarch 9, 2009Lou MelendezSAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO LOU MELENDEZ: If you look at the middle of our infield, Cora, Andy Gonzalez, Felipe Lopez, those guys are interchangeable. And Andy can play first base and he can play the outfield too. So you would have to attribute that to the coaches and the manager who think about it very carefully and they think about it, when they're doing it, they're thinking about the countries that they're going to play against and the likelihood of the rosters, you know, especially when you formulate your 45-man roster, they're looking at the players on that side and they know more or less who is going to be later on on the roster, who they are or what have you, so they're looking at things that are ahead of everybody else. Q. It's definitely an aim or a goal then? LOU MELENDEZ: Oh, yeah. It is. And the same thing with the pitching. The same thing with the pitching. Q. You've seen how the Dominicans sort have been hamstrung, they don't have a first baseman, they have two shortstops who can't play anything but short, and two second basemen who can't play anything but second. LOU MELENDEZ: And that's the problem. It can affect you offensively and obviously that can affect you in terms of the people that you're going to play in a certain game. So, I mean we have, we have a well-rounded ballclub, you know, we have guys who can hit for average, hit for power, play defense, a good pitching staff that as you can see from the games before in Florida and our first game, you know, anything can change at any moment with respect to the pitching, but so far, so good. Q. Do you think that you guys got lost a little bit in the discussion? I mean everyone obviously picked the favorite as the Dominicans, but you guys, obviously, your team is pretty stacked. LOU MELENDEZ: Yeah, I mean it is. We have a very, very good team. If you look at our lineup, from top to bottom, I mean, they are a very good group of ball players. There's some stars in there, some guys who are not stars but will be stars. I look at our 2006 team and you see that there were some young guys that didn't play all that much and now they're playing more. Soto was Rookie of the Year last year, Pudge and Yadier, you know, so yeah, it's, there are a lot of good ball players on this club. A lot of people were focusing a great deal on the United States, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and I told that to the guys when we first met in Fort Myers, I said, I told them, you know, everybody, I feel bad because everybody's focusing on three countries and not looking at us and we're a good team. And we'll prove that to everybody. Q. Do you feel lucky, I mean obviously the Dominican Republic had a lot of guys who weren't able to come or didn't come, and most of your stars are here. LOU MELENDEZ: These guys wants to play. I had the opposite problem. And I know some of the stuff that happened to the Dominican Republic has to be attributed obviously to injury. But all the guys who are here desperately wanted to play. All the guys who didn't make the 28-man roster were disappointed that they didn't get a chance to be on this team. So that was the least of my problems. These are guys that wanted to play, they had committed. You could see is that they're playing with heart and a lot of determination. End of FastScripts |
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