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NL DIVISION SERIES: PIRATES v CARDINALSOctober 6, 2013Clint HurdlePITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA: Game Three Pirates – 5 Q. Just to actually look ahead to tomorrow. How do you think your guys will handle it, especially Walker? This was a bit of a heart‑breaker. How do you think they'll respond? MIKE MATHENY: We've had them all season, most teams have. I've been very impressed how our club has bounced back whenever something hasn't gone exactly how we planned. They have a short memory. Right now it hurts. They're going to sit on it for a little while. Tomorrow morning they'll be ready to go. Q. Mike, following up on that, you're obviously in a difficult situation, but you take heart from your club's proven ability to come from behind in various situations? MIKE MATHENY: Yeah. Another game where they showed a lot of fight. Just started putting together better at‑bats as the game went. Just don't think they ever count themselves out regardless what happens. So it was another game where they showed a lot of heart. We just ended up being a little bit short. Q. Mike, in that bottom of the eighth inning, you guys had just thrown McCutchen out of third base. How big of an at‑bat that one by Byrd was, and it looked like breaking balls up until 100 mile‑an‑hour fastball, and it still didn't get him out. MIKE MATHENY: Yeah. Carlos has done a really nice job‑‑ that was easily a momentum changer with the big play from Kozma to third to get McCutchen. But just got a couple of balls too much at the plate. And I haven't seen them on replay yet, but some good swings put us in a bad spot. But guys played‑‑ made some good defensive plays today to help us out. Q. Talk about the approach to Liriano. It looked like you made him stretch out a little bit, throw more pitches. But that said, are you frustrated that you didn't score more than two against him? MIKE MATHENY: Yeah, we had a couple of real good opportunities. You look at the situation, guys in scoring position, and Holliday up hitting the ball hard to right field. When it came off the bat, I thought it would have a little more carry than it did. Early on it seemed like as soon as we got our eyes fixed, it was a little tough to see early. And second time through, guys started taking a better approach, better swings and hitting the balls hard. We hit a few at them in key situations that could have turned things around. We had a couple of big at‑bats where either a pitch here or there, it could have gone our way and it would have been a whole different situation. We weren't able to stack them one on top of one another. Fortunately Carlos was a lot of offense and kept us right there. Q. In to light of Charlie Morton's past failures against you guys, do you feel confident you can get to him tomorrow to send the series back to St. Louis? MIKE MATHENY: We don't single anybody out like that. We give respect to all these guys and realize at any night any pitcher can stop a good offense. But we put together a game plan. We take our successes and failures and learn from them from each individual pitcher and try to put a plan together to give us success for the next time. Tomorrow the guys will be ready to go. And we'll put our best game out there. That's what we can do. Q. Mike, did you like the pitch sequence to Alvarez that resulted in the RBI single? MIKE MATHENY: Yeah. It's easy to sit on the side and start second‑guessing pitch sequences. I know that these guys prepare, especially our lefties for the lefties. They've got an idea of not just this sequence but the one they've used before the last time they faced him and what their next pitch is going to be. Every pitch has a purpose. Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't. Kevin Siegrist has done such a great job for us, especially as a young guy. Hasn't been in this league before. You put him in a big situation and all season long he's done a terrific job for us. That's the match‑up we wanted. And today they won. Q. On the at‑bat before, how much thought did you give to not walking Alvarez and pitching to him there before Martin's sac fly? MIKE MATHENY: We gave some thought to it. Once again, we know we have a guy in the bullpen who has had an opportunity to turn a lot of groundball double plays for us. And figured that was a great strength of ours. So it was a tough situation. You never really like taking your starter out of the game, especially when he's been throwing the ball pretty well. But things were leading in that direction. It's something that's worked for us all season, so we're going to stick with it. Q. How did you read Kelly in the first inning. Obviously it was tough to get out of that inning. Was that more of a by‑product of him picking or the Pirates having a good approach? I mean, how did you read what went on there. It seemed a little uncharacteristic for him. MIKE MATHENY: I saw him get two quick outs. Those two‑out walks seem to come back and bite you. Some pretty close pitches. Once again, it was kind of tough for everybody to see. We could hardly see anything from the dugout. I thought he held his composure well. He gave up a couple, but then still made good pitches. I thought he showed a lot. I thought he really did show a lot in to an atmosphere like this. He's a guy that we anticipate would be able to handle whatever came at him and gave us a good chance to win today. Too unfortunate that it started the way it did early. Q. Mike, I'm sure you heard the atmosphere on Tuesday night was pretty electric here coming into this game how do you think you guys responded and did the Pirates gain some advantage from the crowd today? MIKE MATHENY: I thought the atmosphere was great. We love the excitement and the noise. We anticipated the Pirate fans would be excited and loud, as they should be. Just like our fans back home are. That's something I know the Pirates feed off of. But so do our guys. This isn't the first time the majority of them have been in a loud atmosphere against. It's something they talk a lot about. Some of their best postseason memories are in situations like this. It was great to see that the people here were into it. And I thought our guys did a nice job of doing what they had to do and not making that an issue. THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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