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AL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: TIGERS v RANGERSOctober 12, 2011C.J. WilsonDETROIT, MICHIGAN: Game Four THE MODERATOR: We are going to get started once again. C.J. Wilson is here. Q. C.J., how careful are you watching the weather forecast after what you went through the other day? C.J. WILSON: You know, there's nothing I can do about it. The only thing I can do is if I get interrupted again, try to make a better adjustment. And I've got a little better plan for that I guess after having gone through it. Q. C.J., during an in-game interview with Fox, I think it was Sunday, you mentioned you felt crunchy coming back after the rain delay. Can you expand upon what that means for a pitcher? C.J. WILSON: Sometimes my vocabulary gets the best of me, I guess. You stiffen up. You get fully warm, you're sweaty, you're lubed up and then you shut down. There's nothing really you can do. If you've thrown that many pitches, it's not like you want to go into the batting cage and throw another three simulated innings. That's not what you do. You try to stretch or whatever. There's no substitute for staying in the flow of the course of the game. Q. C.J., obviously this is a big winter for you professionally and there's already a lot of talk about your free agency in other towns where they're not in the postseason anymore, particularly in New York. How do you handle that now when you have so much in front of you here on the field and everything? C.J. WILSON: By ignoring it. That's how I do it. People ask me, and I say the same thing. I'm in the playoffs. Where else would I rather be than right now? This is the ultimate spot to be. We have a lead. Obviously, we're happy about that. After three games we're in a good position. We went to the World Series last year. So I know what that's like. We want to win it this year. We have to beat the Tigers first. Obviously, they're a great team. And there's not that many players in baseball that have the opportunity to do what I'm doing, which is to be a good player on a good team. A lot of guys are stuck on teams that aren't going anywhere. I'm in a good organization. I've worked my whole life to get to this point. So I'm not going to like misappropriate any mental resources towards the future. The only future for me is tomorrow. That's the only thing I'm worried about right now. Q. C.J., you guys quietly I think finished third in the AL amongst starters in ERA Do you feel like in this series the starters maybe haven't pitched as well as you did during the season? Or is that oversimplifying it a little bit? C.J. WILSON: Well, I mean, you have to take the Game 1 kind of out of it. Because that was just a weird game. Obviously how many times had Verlander ever gone less than six innings this year? It was only because of the rain. So for me, I think it's a similar situation. If we wouldn't have had that rain delay, him and I probably would have thrown seven or eight innings. It would have been a pitcher's dual, from the starting pitchers, not the bullpens. Q. Obviously Derek and Colby didn't pitch as well as they would have wanted to because everybody wants to go out and throw a shutout. The reality is we're playing against the best team in the American League right now besides ourselves. You're not going to roll over and stand there and swing and miss at everything. You have to make them work. And they are going to make us work. You have to kind of throw stats out the window in the postseason because one game you have one bad game, one good game, it totally looks weird. Over the course of maybe 10, 12, 15 postseason starts, then you can say a guy is X or Y a postseason pitcher. At this point, none of us has that much experience. It's not like we've been coming here for the past five or six years. Q. C.J., based on everything you just said about the team being in the playoffs and the World Series, the fact that they moved you from the bullpen into the starting rotation here. What's your long-term feelings about staying with Texas? C.J. WILSON: Well, I'm just going to say the same thing I just did, which is like I'm here right now. So that's the focus. I'm wearing a Texas Rangers uniform. I'm not concerning myself with any other organizations at this point. I'm a baseball fan. So obviously I pay attention to everything that's going on. I'm on the web sites. I read stuff every once in a while about what's going on in baseball, other organizations. I try to keep abreast of it because it's my industry. Just like I would car racing and photography or whatever else. You know, the fact that this organization I think is going in a good direction, obviously, I think is a very good thing for everybody. Q. C.J., in the last two weeks you've had a couple of unusual things. You had the brief start on the last -- your last start of the regular season, then the short start before the playoff opener, then the rain interrupted one. Have you finally been able to get into a rhythm going into this start? C.J. WILSON: Yeah, hopefully. It will be my I guess -- I don't know, when you have short rest, that's weird sometimes. At the end of September, you know, we were kind of in a weird place as a team where we're trying to win every game. But I knew they weren't going to let me throw that many innings my last start. So it kind of put me in a little bit of a funk I think mentally, because I wasn't sure if I should try to go out there and throw more innings or fight for more innings or what. I wanted us to get home-field advantage and I felt like I had a chance to do that. But the ultimate thing is like the weather could play a factor again tomorrow. We hope it doesn't. I don't think any of the fans want to sit around in the rain. I don't think any of the people at home want to watch that many more commercials. I think they want to watch a lot of good baseball. That's why this is the weird time of year in that sense. Obviously, we don't have a dome, they don't have a dome. So we can't rule out any disturbances. Nothing is regular at this point. There's no regular starts in the postseason. There's no regular routine. Travel is weird. It's weird having to do this and talk to you guys like this. So whatever. Q. You said if there is rain delays you would have a different plan. What exactly do you have in mind? C.J. WILSON: I believe that would be none of your business. I'm not going to talk about it now. There's no point of talking about it before it happens. I know -- I've talked to some people about it, and I have never gone through it before really. So now that I've done it, I can say I did this wrong, I did that wrong. But I'm not going to sit here and dissect that before it happens or afterwards. I have to keep strategy close to my chest. Q. C.J., you mentioned the other day that you had a sinus infection. Was that something that bothered you for a little bit, and are you over that right now? C.J. WILSON: Our whole team has been going through some sort of allergy, sinus, combination or whatever. It happens. People get sick. I didn't think it particularly affected me. Like that was just sort of saying -- when I said that, it was one of those things like saying obviously I didn't have all the perfect circumstances. It wasn't 72 degrees, no breeze. But it rarely is in Texas anyway. So it doesn't really matter. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, C.J. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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