|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: CARDINALS v BREWERSOctober 14, 2011Ron RoenickeST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: Game Five Q. I just wondered, how much in your opinion your ballpark changes, roof on, roof off, and if it changes at all, in terms of the competition how maybe you go about it or the character of the competition. RON ROENICKE: Yeah, the roof being on or off, I don't think it plays any different. What the nice thing is when we have the bad weather, we close it. But as far as how it plays, it doesn't play any different. The shadows, when you have a 1:00 game, the shadows are a little more in play when you have the roof open. But they close one of the panels enough to where it's pretty good for the pitcher and the hitter. But as far as how it plays, no, if it's nice enough outside, you leave it open. And if it's cold and got a chance of rain, you close it. It seems to play the same. Q. Do you have any examples of how some of your battle-tested guys, the Kotsays, Counsells, Frankie Rodriguez might be helping some of the younger guys th rough this post-season now and especially with the pressure ramped up? RON ROENICKE: I think it's really important. I think having those guys talking all the time, Kots keeps things pretty loose in the locker room. Jerry Hairston keeps it loose and keeps the guys riled up in the dugout. Counsell is just a steady guy that they know they can all go to with anything that comes up. He says something when it needs to be said. But I think it's really important to have guys that have been through the playoffs; whether it's going all the way to the World Series, I don't know if that matters that much. I think it's helpful as far as them talking about it when everybody knows that they have been in the World Series. But it's just the atmosphere of the playoffs on how things are a little bit different for everybody. But it's huge. Q. You talked before the post-season started about some guys could benefit from seeing the zeros next to their name when the stats reset; Betancourt is having a great post-season for you. Is he one of the guys that benefitted from that, and how much does it mean to your offense that he's producing down there after the season he had? RON ROENICKE: Yeah, be Yuni, when he's got it going, he did for that period during the season for a month and a half, two months, we really scored a lot of runs when he was swinging it well. It allows your lineup to go deeper with where you're scoring your runs. For a while, we were scoring because of Braun and Prince. We were getting guys on for them, but that's how you score runs. And then when Yuni started hitting, Lucroy kind of started hitting, and all of a sudden we started producing a lot more runs, and a lot more runs in different innings than we were before. Sometimes you look at your lineup and you can't wait to get to your one and two again so you have your big boys coming up because you know that's how you're going to score runs. It's really nice when it doesn't matter and you have a chance, maybe Prince makes the last out and you still have a chance to score a couple of runs there before you get to the pitcher's slot. There's really big for an offense if you can do that. Q. Is it just approach for him in the post-season? Is he doing something or is he just seeing different pitch? RON ROENICKE: I think when Yuni goes well, he's covering the outside part of the plate better. He's hitting the ball all over the field more, and I think he's got some hits up the middle in this post-season. When he's doing that, he's staying on balls better. You know, he's pretty quick, so he usually gets to the balls in, but it's probably staying back longer and using all of the field. Q. I'm pretty sure that the general public perceives momentum switches like the one after last night, Game 2, a little bit different than you do in the clubhouse. How do players, managers, look at that, look at those swing games when it seems like the momentum has shifted? RON ROENICKE: Well, as far as the momentum switch, I don't know if we really feel that, but yesterday's game was huge, to be 2-2 instead of 3-1 is huge. Especially against a good team like we are playing. So momentum-wise, I don't know if we feel like all of the sudden we have that extra momentum. I think we are really happy with just getting back tied in the series. Knowing we have a game here and we go back to our place. Q. You mentioned Jerry Hairston before. How has he fit in with the club since he came over during the season and are you getting more out of him in the post-season than you might have expected when you plugged him in the lineup during the Division Series? RON ROENICKE: I think we are getting more out of him than I thought. I have seen Jerry for quite a few years now. Always liked him. Really valuable guy to have on your team, because of the positions that he can play. And he knows how to play. He's not just athletic and quick-footed and all that, but he's got a good head. He really understands the game and where he should be playing, and the different situations that come up, he reacts really well. Coming over, I knew he was a good player. But in this post-season, he's gotten hot offensively. He's gotten hot and he's really helped us with what he's doing there. Defensively he's playing great at third base, which I really didn't know -- we didn't play him that much at third base during the season. We picked him up when Rickie went down and he played a lot of second base, and he also played a lot of centerfield when Carlos went down. So to put him at third, I wasn't quite sure. I haven't seen him that much at third, but he's done a great job. Q. Before last night, no starter had gone beyond the sixth inning in this series. Obviously there's some terrific starters in both rotations. Is that a reflection of the difficulty presented by these two lineups? RON ROENICKE: I think so. I think the guys haven't -- our starters, anyway, haven't been happy with I think their command of their pitches, which only adds into what that offense, good offense, on the other side sees, as far as mistakes. And so it's probably a combination of both. I don't think we have pitched that well, but I think a lot of it is because of the offense that you're facing. Q. Are you set on Marcum for Game 6 or does that depend on what happens today or how do you look at that? RON ROENICKE: Right now we are set on Game 6. I don't know what would come up to change my mind on that, but we talked about it quite a bit and we feel great with Marcum going, just like we felt great with Wolf going yesterday. We expect a real good game from Shaun. Q. On that thought if you were going down, was there any discussion about Gallardo on short rest? Is that just not an option? RON ROENICKE: That's not an option. Some guys, I think there's times when you think -- you feel good about it. Zack, for instance, at the end of our season, and in that first game in the post-season, there was a reason for it. It was set up for that as far as pitch counts. Yo, he's been getting after it pretty good. I think the last game he threw in Game 5 against Arizona, he got after it good. And I think some of that may be why he was a little bit off the other day pitching. But I don't want to bring him back on three days. If Yo came to me and said, you know something, I feel great, I'd love to come back on three days, it makes you think a little bit. But until that happens, I don't want to go to a player and ask him to do something that he hasn't done all year, hasn't done in his career. I would feel -- I just wouldn't feel right doing that. Q. Staying with Marcum for a moment, you've said, and Shaun has said, that it's a lot of bad luck. But have you and Rick seen anything in the film that might leave you to suspect anything other than bad luck in Marcum's starts? RON ROENICKE: Well, I think bad luck, some of it comes from not being quite as sharp. I don't think he's quite as sharp. But he is having bad luck. He'll give up -- he'll give up a jam shot base hit, he'll give up -- the next guy will hit a ground ball between somebody and then he'll make a bad pitch and somebody will hit a homer off him. I think early in the season, his stuff was maybe a little crisper, maybe they weren't quite getting that bloop hit, or hitting it to where we can catch it, or a swing and a miss. I still think he's throwing well. I don't think he's as bad as what his numbers have been. Q. Based on the way you've managed the club and displaying a level of confidence and trust in the players, would it be fair to say that not starting Marcum would be out of character? RON ROENICKE: Yeah, it would be out of character. Marcum had -- the first two months of the season, he was probably our best pitcher. And then I thought he was pretty steady from there on out. He still finished with a good year. I know you look at the last few games, and we talk about whether it's luck, whether he's not quite as sharp; his numbers aren't as good. But I still think Shaun is capable of getting back to where he was like he started at the beginning of the year. He's a command guy. He needs to have his command. He needs to change speeds. And sometimes just that feel of throwing the ball, the confidence that you have, changing speeds on people, he's a very sharp guy as far as recognizing what a hitter is doing to him. And I think he needs to get back to that feeling of -- he used to create stuff out there. If he wanted to throw a slow curveball, he would throw a real slow curveball. He and Greinke and Wolf, would flip up that curveball that would be 66 or whatever. So I think he just needs to relax, pitch the way that we really feel like he's going to do. Q. If I'm not mistaken, Corey has swung the bat really good in the NLDS but now not so much in the NLCS. I know he wasn't feeling good at the start of the series. What have you seen from him? Was the illness a part of it or he's just not swinging the bat well? RON ROENICKE: Well, the illness could have been part of it. Sometimes when you are run down from being sick, you'll have a couple of bad games and then all of a sudden it gets a little mental and you know you're not quite as confident. It could have been that. I don't know that that was any of it. Corey's history wise, he's been a streaky hitter. We have not seen that this year. He's been pretty solid all year. Hopefully that was just a few games there and hopefully he'll get that back. We need this guy to swing it, and especially being in the lead-off spot, when he's hot, we do an awful lot offensively. Q. All year you guys had role players making a big contribution and now in the playoffs, it's really Ryan and Prince in the spotlight. A game like last night, Randy Wolf has all of the attention but you probably don't win without Hairston and Betancourt's contributions. Do their contributions keep getting overshadowed and people have a notion that you depend on Ryan and Prince alone? RON ROENICKE: Yeah, they probably get overshadowed. It's hard to look past Braun and Prince and what they do. But when we have the other guys contributing, it usually ends up with a lot of offense, usually ends up with a lot of runs score, and all year because we have pitched so well, that gives us certainly a lot more wins. When it's just Prince and Braun swinging the bat, we are going to score runs, but it's not going to be the run total that we are always coming out ahead and winning ballgames. Q. For those of us who have not covered your club all year, what went into the decision to put Corey in the lead-off spot, and how did that change your lineup, change your attack? RON ROENICKE: Corey going to the lead-off spot, it has not changed what we do as an offense, because Rickie Weeks was basically the same guy. They both -- their average, both of them were good, .280, their on-base were both good, .350, .360. They both are scary and can hit homers to start off the game. It's hard to throw balls down the middle to them. I think the reason we did it was we needed somebody to hit behind Prince and Casey did not have the kind of year that he had last year, so we tried to move Corey Hart there in that spot. Corey Hart, as some of you guys have talked to him, was not a big fan of hitting fifth. And so the result of that was, let's flip-flop Rickie, who did not mind hitting fifth, behind Prince, and it worked out really well until Rickie went down with the bad ankle injury, the offense was really running well. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|