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AL DIVISION SERIES: ORIOLES v YANKEESOctober 7, 2012Buck ShowalterBALTIMORE, MARYLAND: Game One YANKEES – 7 Q. You've obviously seen Jim Johnson a lot better than tonight. What were you seeing from him specifically? What happened? BUCK SHOWALTER: It's tough. It's just tough going, period. There's not much margin for error. Jimmy has been great for us all year and will be again. Tonight just wasn't his night. Gave up really one hard‑hit ball. Cano had a good swing on a ball away. Credit that one, too. Those things happen. Q. It had been almost a month since Jason had pitched. What did you think of what he did? BUCK SHOWALTER: Jason was great. We matched him. As good as Sabathia was, Jason matched him. We had a great defensive game. Reynolds made two great plays at first base. Chris Davis made a couple good plays in the outfield for us. Wieters made that play at the plate. You know how difficult it is, but I don't think‑‑ a catcher's mitt, too, that's some kind of play, especially in that situation. That's probably the difference in that ballgame was Jason pitching real well, and I was real proud of him and everybody defensively that kept us in the game. Got away from us a little bit there at the end, though. Q. You get the lead‑off double to set up late in the game there against CC, he comes back, gets the next three outs. That late in the game to have him do what he did, how difficult‑‑ how impressive was that, just to stop you guys there? BUCK SHOWALTER: Oh, he's not doing anything out there that impresses us more than what he's done. He's got a track record of pitching in those games for a long time and doing well, but I was more proud of us matching him. Our guys were doing well. Just took four guys to match him. But you see a pitch count down like that, you know he's going to be out there for a long time. We had our chances. We had some chances there, some good people up that had solid years for us, and it's more of a tribute to him than any detraction from our guys. I was so proud of our club tonight, the way they competed and played defense and pitched. It was fun to watch. Q. It seemed like early in the game you guys were swinging early in the counts, which kind ofhelped CC along with the low pitch count. Was that the approach or were they just swinging at pitches early in the count? BUCK SHOWALTER: Well, he was throwing strikes. The only time you've got a shot at a quality guy like him is if his command is a little bit of an issue, and you could tell from the get‑go that he had good command of the baseball and he was around the plate. I said before the game that a lot of people miss how much of a pitcher he is. You go back and chart how many fastballs, how many breaking balls, how many changeups, you'd be surprised. Maybe not y'all because you get to see him a lot, but he's a pitcher. He's a complete guy. I don't think it's necessarily as much us as it was the type of command he had tonight. You know, good pitchers make a living out of making pitches appear‑‑ he can take you off the sweet part of the bat. How many strikeouts did he have tonight? Seven, there weren't that many for a while. I think we may have struck out more guys. But that's not an evaluator of what type of stuff a guy is carrying all the time. Q. Could you talk about Jim Johnson? You've managed him now for a couple, two and a half years. Any doubts at all that if he's in that situation again he can come back? BUCK SHOWALTER: No. No, that's the easiest question I'll get tonight. It's real easy to put your faith in a guy like Jim Johnson, not only as a pitcher but as a man. He's the reason why we're out there playing this game tonight, one of the big reasons. Every guy in that clubhouse knows that he's a special guy. You'd have to be real picky to find something you don't like about Jim Johnson. We like him wearing our uniform, whatever the statistics our outcome may be. He's pretty special. Q. You talked about the resiliency of this club. How important is it to be able to come back tomorrow and be able to‑‑ after what happened in that ninth inning to be able to come back? BUCK SHOWALTER: There's a lot of other things that happen, too. It depends on whether you want to dwell on the negative or the positive. I understand what time of year it is when it's all goat‑hero time. Our guys get it. This is a very realistic club that lives in reality but they also understand the sense of urgency. You can sit here and say you got beat by a real good quality pitcher tonight, but that's why teams like that are playing this time of year. We have good quality pitchers, too. I don't have any doubt what type of mentality our guys will have as we go forward in this series. But that's another thing, kind of like Jimmy. To me what our club has gone through this year and the way they've responded, that's a real easy question to answer. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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