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NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: CARDINALS v BREWERS

October 14, 2011

Ron Roenicke

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: Game Five

ST. LOUIS CARDINALS 7
MILWAUKEE BREWERS 1

Q. You said before the game you did not see any circumstance where Marcum would not be your Game 6 starter. Is that still true?
RON ROENICKE: Yes.

Q. And it's mainly because you do not want to bring Yovani back on short rest for the first time?
RON ROENICKE: Yeah, I'm not going to bring Yovani back.

Q. What can you even say about your defense after that game? You've had some bad defensive games this year, but a lot of times you've overcome it, but looked like tonight you just weren't able to.
RON ROENICKE: No, we still had some opportunities to score offensively, even though we gave up the runs for Zack. We put the ball in play a couple of times and scored two runs when we had runners on third base and less than two outs and it's a 5-3 game. And still felt good there. We had opportunities with people on base, and we swung the bat okay today. But defensively, yeah, we gave up some runs.

Q. What was your overall assessment of how Zack pitched? No strikeouts, but still kept you in that ballgame.
RON ROENICKE: Yeah, Zack threw the ball well. You know, I know he didn't get the strikeouts, but he still should have given up one run, really, if we make the plays for him. So I like the way he threw it. His fastball was good today. His breaking ball, he couldn't get in the dirt when he wanted to get one down. He couldn't bounce it. That hurt him. But I thought he threw the ball well.

Q. Again, with the defense, how do you explain a night like tonight? Is it a focus on concern or does it just happen to be coincidence that you get so many in the same game?
RON ROENICKE: It's definitely not focus. When you play in a game like this, you're going to be focused. You know, Jerry Hairston makes a great diving play on the one before and then he lets one get through his legs, certainly not typical for him. And then Rickie had, you know, some plays that I'm sure he's disappointed he didn't make, but that hurt. You give these guys extra outs and they are going to hurt you.

Q. The history of your ballclub this summer suggests that they will put this one over their shoulders and get back to a higher level of play, and I assume you have great confidence that that's exactly what's going to occur.
RON ROENICKE: I'm sure we're going to come out and play a good game. These games, we do have them once in a while. We had one a couple of days ago.
So hopefully, hopefully we come back out, and I'm confident that we will, and play a good game on Sunday.

Q. Normally a very confident group, considering the way the games have gone the last week or so. Does winning two in a row even at home seem a little more daunting than it did maybe two weeks ago?
RON ROENICKE: No. I have a lot of confidence in our guys. They are confident at home. We can win two ballgames at home. We are going to have to play a lot better baseball than what we have played here. So yesterday, I thought we played a great ballgame; clean. We did a lot of things well. The other two games, no.
So we can't play games like that and beat these guys two in a row.

Q. For those of us who have not been around your team that much, the shift that you've been using on Pujols, is that something you've used fairly regularly against him and are there certain pitchers that works a little better with on the mound than others?
RON ROENICKE: Yeah, we match up. We are not over-shifted on everybody with him. Just depends on what we have out there, what we see on the spray charts, and it's percentages. He's going to beat us once in a while on a shift, but it's worked okay so far.

Q. You mentioned that crisp game you played last night. Does that make it even more puzzling that you would follow that one with this one? The two really don't really add up.
RON ROENICKE: No, they don't. During the season we haven't had games where 2 out of 3 we played like this. We haven't done it. Still I'm confident that we will come out and play hopefully two good games.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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