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MLB WORLD SERIES: RANGERS v GIANTSOctober 27, 2010C.J. WilsonSAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA: Game One Q. Could you describe the challenges the Giants' lineup presents? C.J. WILSON: Well, you know, one thing obviously is they have a heavily right-handed lineup, so for me it's going to be important for me to mix my pitches well. Against left-handed lineups generally I can just kind of throw fastballs, so it makes it easy. But with righties I've got to kind of keep them guessing a little bit more. Q. I asked Matt Cain the same question: Being able to sit and watch live tonight, is that an advantage versus just looking at tape and tendencies and so forth? C.J. WILSON: Absolutely. Any time, especially for me, I feel like getting to follow Cliff is a big deal because we have enough similarities that whatever successes he has, I can try to follow and sort of draft off of him, as well. Q. I know how much you look forward to hitting, and I'm just wondering about how you're feeling in your at-bats, batting practice the last couple of days. C.J. WILSON: I feel fine. I mean, I haven't taken any real live swings since June or whatever, so it's not like I've got 600 at-bats or something like that. It's exciting. As a kid I always wanted to be a right fielder or a center fielder, so to get a chance to bat in the World Series is a big deal. But obviously my job description is pitching. That's the main thing. That's what I'm saying, but you know me, so you know how I feel about that. The thing is it'll be important for me to stay in the moment and really just understand that my job, especially if there's guys on base, to bunt them over, unless there's two outs or something. Hopefully we have guys on base. Hopefully we have plenty of offense going on, although Matt is obviously throwing really well this post-season. This is the World Series, the best two teams. It's not like they're throwing up some kid that's going to lob a ball up there. He throws 94 miles an hour with a curveball and a change-up, so he's really good. Q. I understand Bud Black was a family friend growing up. Was that a helpful relationship to you when you were learning the game? C.J. WILSON: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like we met because his daughters went to school with my cousins down in San Diego. My aunt was pestering him like, hey, I've got a nephew that can throw and he's a lefty. He's like, yeah, right, whatever. So we played catch one day in his backyard, and when I think I was probably 15 years old or whatever, and he's like, okay, let's go in the garage, and he's like, pick out a glove, you're going to need it. He gave my one of his gloves. It was a Wilson model, Bud Black or whatever, and I used it for, I don't know, seven or eight years. The thing was like cracked and dilapidated by the time I was done with it. Ever since then, ever since that day he's kind of taken the time to keep in touch, and we talk about everything. He's one of the people that I really -- when the transition from reliever to starter came up I asked him because he's known me for so long, and I asked him what does he think, and he asked me what I thought, and he said, "If you think there's any chance you can do it, you have to try." So that was kind of the final -- him and I had that conversation last year when the Padres came to visit us in Texas. Q. How do you prepare? Do you prepare any differently when you're facing a team of sort of free-swingers which are so completely different than the team you faced in the last round? Did it affect your approach in any way? C.J. WILSON: The knuckleball might get busted out. I mean, what am I going to do? I'm not going to change. I've been successful with my approach, and my general feel is that I have a certain plan that I'm trying to enforce. I have a certain set of rules that I'm going to try to go out there and live by, and if I do that, then I'll be okay. There are a lot of free swingers and some of them I've faced before. I've faced Uribe, Burrell, Cody Ross and Renteria and I also pitched against their team in Spring Training, as well. There's a little bit of memory bank working there for me. But obviously that's a two-way street; they've seen me, as well. I don't think it's any particular advantage. I'd say there's a lot of unfamiliarity, and so hopefully I'll have the jump on them. Q. What's Ron Washington like as a manager? What do you say of him in the clubhouse and the dugout? C.J. WILSON: He's very consistent in his energy. That might seem like kind of a cliché answer but every day he's upbeat and ready to go. He's out there hitting fungoes and taking ground balls and giving guys a hard time, playing dominos and playing cards. He's one of the guys. We feel like there's not a large separation in terms of scale between the manager and the 25th guy on the roster. We all hold each other accountable, and I think that's the open-door policy that he has is very valuable, I think. Q. You talked about how you like pitching after Cliff. Some Giants have talked about how their rotation, their advantage is every pitcher has a different style, so hitters are seeing something different every day. Do you have a contrast with him or more similarities? Or does that factor into ti when hitters have to face him one night and you the next? C.J. WILSON: Someone might have to do Hollywood magic and divide the screen and do an overlay on my stats following him versus not following him, against the same team in the same series or whatever. Basically every game is different, and yeah, like Lincecum and Cain and Sanchez and Bumgarner all throw different in their own ways. But why wouldn't you try to follow the guy that's the best? You know what I mean? That's kind of a -- if you think about it, you can sort of say, oh, there's too many lefties or a lefty following a lefty or whatever, but really the reality is that Cliff is such a high-caliber pitcher that -- who wouldn't want to be as good as he is, you know what I mean? I mean, it works for him, and everybody knows. Like everybody knows. If I ask you guys for a scouting report on Cliff, you're like, oh yeah, he throwing a fastball 92-94, he does this, cuts it backdoor, cuts it inside, changeup. Everybody knows what he has and he still goes out and strikes out 10 dudes in a playoff game. It's like, what are you gonna do? If they know what he's got and they still can't hit him, then why would they hit me? If I can pitch as well as him, I'll probably end up with the same results. Q. Can you talk about what may have surprised you the most going into the rotation and maybe what did you learn about your mental makeup to make the transition look as easy as it has looked? C.J. WILSON: Um, man, you could write a book on that question. It's not easy. You know, nothing is easy in the Major Leagues. The reason why we're up here in this kind of spotlight in the World Series is because we've leveled out our -- we've shrunk the amplitude in the good games and bad games to be consistent enough that you can have a predictability and a consistency to your results, you know? As a starting pitcher it's very important to stay emotionally flat, for me. When I was a reliever I was much more aggressive, much more amped up. If it was like a 1-to-10 scale, I was at a 7 or an 8 all the time, just like, you know, there's more of a max effort kind of pitcher, kind of like the way Brian is over there. And now it's like when I was a starter before, when I was younger, I was more of like a Tom Glavine kind of guy. That's what I was always kind of trying to chase after is that sort of ice water in the veins, real cool-headed, and people that have been around me can see the difference in the temperament inning to inning or whatever now versus game to game last year or something like that, or the year before. And not allowing things to snowball within an inning, not allowing a bad play to turn into a bad hit to a walk and not allowing things to kind of cascade is a skill that you learn as a reliever because you get yanked out of the game if you can't do it. Minimizing big innings is something that has helped me in my transition. But I got that from relieving. That's a skill that like -- it's a graduate level skill. You don't just figure that out. It takes a long time of getting your head kicked in before you get it, before you get good at it. For me, though, I still feel like this year is incomplete. We're here to complete the season, and that's the thing, that's the goal that we've had the whole way. It's the goal that I've had, as well. Individually I'm not really concerned with my accomplishments of the season at all. I don't feel like I did that particularly that great of a job. I didn't make the All-Star team or definitely not going to win the Cy Young. I'm not even in the conversation for that stuff. So for me it's a very average year. Hopefully it's a baseline year for me so that I can provide my team with innings and a low ERA to go out there and win games the rest of my career. Q. There were some thoughts that Washington may put Colby ahead of you for the series. Would that have mattered at all if you went No. 2 or No. 3 in that rotation here? C.J. WILSON: Well, the only difference would just be like I was asked earlier about splitting up the lefty-righty thing because other than that I wouldn't see a need particularly for that. But I feel good if we go to seven games having Colby start. He's lined up to start the seventh game, and he can swing the bat, too, so that's cool. Q. Sort of following up on that, obviously a big difference would be pitching here in Game 2 versus pitching back home in Game 3. How does this ballpark, the dimensions and the quirkiness of it maybe figure into a pitcher's assignment? C.J. WILSON: It's like the exact opposite of Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium is like 310 down the lines and 340 in the gaps. It's like you sneeze on a ball, break a bat, it's out. This place you really have to hit the ball better. It's much more of a pitcher's ballpark. If you look at the Sabermetric stat evaluations of a ballpark like Yankee Stadium and our stadium are the worst. We're like two of the top three or four highest run-producing ballpark factors and this is one of the lowest, here and Safeco in Seattle. The air is heavy so the ball is going to sink more, the breaking ball is going to break more. So that's something that factors in a little bit. But like I said yesterday, throwing the ball down the middle and challenging a guy to hit it 390 feet is not a great strategy. That's not pitching, that's just throwing. For me I'm always going to pitch the same way, which is to get the ball in the infield. If it's a fly ball, it's something that the outfielder has to run in on, not run back on. Q. A lot of people were believing that the Rays in first place and then the Yankees are the favorites to win the Series. This time things have switched around. Everybody seems to believe that the Rangers are going to win the Series. Does this put a lot of additional pressure on you guys? C.J. WILSON: I mean, personally I'm not going to worry about ratings and stuff until next year when they rank us before the season starts in Spring Training to see who's going to win the AL West or something. Right now it's a seven-game series to determine the champion of the world, which is pretty cool, right? So I'm not really worried about who says what. I'm not worried about who writes what, about how we match up or whatever. We feel like we have a good team, and that's why we're here. They think they have a good team, and we know they have a good team. That's why they beat the Phillies and that's why they beat the Braves. This is the easy part. All the pressure is gone now. We won the league championship. It's over. We beat the Yankees. Now it's just about playing good baseball, and that's what everybody is really focused on. We're such a loose group of guys anyway that I don't think the pressure -- the pressure is only to outdo the guy next to you so you can talk smack in the locker room. Like, dude, you only got two hits today, I got three. That's the pressure. Having Nelson Cruz come up to me and be disappointed that I had a bad at-bat. That's the pressure. Having Colby or Tommy or Cliff make fun of me on the plane on the way back for walking a couple guys or something. That's the pressure. Other than that, this press stuff exists in its own little vacuum, and I don't think a lot of guys in there are very concerned with the outside factors. It's more just let's just play baseball, let's have fun and enjoy the club and stuff. End of FastScripts |
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