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WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC POOL D: SAN JUANMarch 11, 2009Rod DelmonicoSAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO ROD DELMONICO: I talked to him on the phone and our youngest son was going to come here and be the batboy, but he started to have problems on Saturday, so he couldn't come be a batboy. So that was disappointing because I would like for him to have experienced this as a 10th grader. But. Q. Is he going to be in Miami? ROD DELMONICO: He would love to fly down for a day or two, but he's got baseball and it's hard for him to get away. Joey is a junior in college at Ball State and Mickey is playing at Farragut High School in Knoxville. Q. Are you over being called a Cinderella? I think it's been brought up, you even brought it up, David and Goliath? ROD DELMONICO: No, we're still David and Goliath. We're still David. We got some rocks in our pocket, we have been hitting the target pretty regularly here, but I don't think there's a team that we're going to go up against from here on that we're better than on paper. So our only chance is to outplay them. To play harder, have more passion, execute, play good defense, don't beat yourself mentally. We got to do all those little things to win and it's got to be up-and-down the dugout. We can't take an inning off and give somebody four or five outs. Perfect example, against Puerto Rico, we gave them four or five outs in an inning and they beat us. And we can't do that. Q. How do you manage the team? How do you see at what point you're going to take out and bring in new guys? ROD DELMONICO: It's been a staff move. Both the pitching coaches, Bert and Jim. Jim's in the bullpen sitting around mapping out who we have available. And really our goal from day one is we're just not going to let them see the same pitcher twice, other than our starters. And we tried to do that. Just don't run them through the lineup more than once. Great hitters adjust after one at-bat. Good hitters adjust after two at bats. The poor hitters it takes three at bats to adjust. So for us, we just didn't want -- there's nothing but great hitters over there -- so we tried to just keep switching. If you noticed, they started to get a better look at Sidney and all our guys after the third time around or second time around, they had some better at bats. And that's because they're major league hitters. Q. Sidney's pitching in the first game. Talk about Sidney. ROD DELMONICO: I'm really proud of Sidney both on and off the field. Somebody should give him a chance. He can pitch in the big leagues. He's got a seven-week-old daughter that he cares about, and somebody need to give him a chance at the big league level. And Pedro. I would sign Pedro Martinez right now and Sidney. Somebody needs to jump on those two guys. I was very impressed with Pedro. Very impressed. That's good stuff right there. Q. How about Pudge? ROD DELMONICO: Pudge, I didn't see him play the first night. He hit two home runs, he's an all-star, still got bat speed. You always need catchers in the big league level, you need them at the little league level. How can you not take that guy? When you don't have catching, you got a guy like that that's available, you got to get him. End of FastScripts |
