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NL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES: CARDINALS v BREWERS

October 16, 2011

Ron Roenicke

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN: Game Six

St. Louis Cardinals 12
Milwaukee Brewers 6

Q. What went wrong with your starting pitching this series?
RON ROENICKE: A combination of good offensive in St. Louis and us not commanding the baseball. You can't get away with mistakes to them. And we made way too many mistakes.

Q. Is that one of the hardest parts of this, Ron, that starting pitching is what carried you guys all year, and then here it just wasn't the same?
RON ROENICKE: Yeah, it was tough. You go into playoffs, we talk about it all the time. Things need to go your way. You need to play well. You need to get breaks.
We didn't pitch as well offensively. I thought we were pretty good, although we couldn't touch their bullpen. Their bullpen came in and we didn't do too much against them.
But that pitching, it got us here. I know some of them aren't happy with their performances, but over the year, outstanding. And for the five guys I thought they did a great job.

Q. Did Marcum do anything differently today than he's done in his last few starts?
RON ROENICKE: Well, I think he had a different game plan going into it, never was able to really get to that game plan.
They were some kind of team in that first inning. We couldn't get away with anything. We didn't make good pitches. But we just never had a chance to get into our comfort zone, into a rhythm, except for Wolfy's start, which was outstanding. But they just didn't let up on us.

Q. How do you reconcile being so sure that Marcum was the guy and then him falling flat on his face again? How do you reconcile those two things?
RON ROENICKE: I know it was the right decision. I'm not second-guessing anything there. It was the right decision. With the options that we had, these guys pitched well all year, still thought that they had good starts in them. I was expecting that to happen today, as well as a lot of the other games that we didn't pitch well.
I like all five of them. I'll go through a season anywhere with those five starters.

Q. What has Prince meant to the club this year?
RON ROENICKE: Having a guy hitting 4th for you that can do the things that he can do, on-base percentage, average, power, RBIs, leader in the clubhouse. It's hard to say where we would be without him this year. A huge part of certainly why we're here.
But he's a force. When he gets it going, boy, he can do a lot of damage.

Q. What's your overall perspective now? This club achieved so much, but not quite what it wanted.
RON ROENICKE: Well, you talk about playoffs. You don't know what is going to happen in playoffs. The hardest thing is it to get there. You get to the playoffs, get hot and you can roll through the playoffs.
St. Louis is hot. Did they do anything wrong during the series? That's incredible to go through a series and have everything you do go right. That's what you have to have happen in playoffs. You have to have breaks that you create because you're playing good, which they did.
But they outplayed us. They're a good team and they outplayed us.

Q. After you tied the series 2-2, the last two games pretty bad games. Is that hard to take, have the series 2-2, and then have two bad games end the season?
RON ROENICKE: I wouldn't call today a bad game. We swung the bats well. We scored six runs today. Usually with our pitching, six runs I'd be happy with that. I would think that we would come out with a victory.
But unfortunately they were swinging the bats a little bit better.

Q. You guys fell behind early in all the games. Talk about how hard that is to pull out of that hole.
RON ROENICKE: It is hard to get behind in the first inning like we did. But two of the games we bounced back well. Today's game we bounced back. And shoot, we're right in it again. And then we let it get away and then we bounced back. But we couldn't keep it up, we couldn't keep bouncing back with all the runs they were getting.

Q. Obviously a lot of accomplishments this season. The goal, though, obviously in any season is a World Series. How do you measure to what degree this season could be a success?
RON ROENICKE: Well, there's lots of goals. I don't think the goal when you start a season is to say we need to get to the World Series. Your goal is to win your division. You're playing 162 games to get into the playoffs, that's what your goal is. And we reached that goal. We reached another goal when we got past the first round.
We didn't reach the ultimate goal, which is to get to the World Series. We fell two games shy of that. I'm happy with our season. I'm happy with a bunch of guys. I was certainly blessed to be able to manage not just a great team, but a great bunch of young men.

Q. Going in, did you consider Narveson a bit of a security blanket and what did you see in him?
RON ROENICKE: Yeah, I think it was nice knowing that Narvy was going to be there if we needed to. Certainly I was hoping we didn't need to get to him so early. But you don't know. You don't know what's going to happen with your pitchers when they go out there.
They had a pretty good pitching staff and we got to all their starters. It's a matter of them coming in with a bullpen that was really throwing the ball well. And they were able to do it in almost every game.

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