AL DIVISION SERIES: RANGERS v YANKEES

October 9, 1999

Johny Oates

JOHNNY OATES: Right from Game 1, the catch made New York turn the momentum, what it was there, off of Game 1, it would have been a whole different series. That play set the tone, I thought. Tonight he got good jumps on all the balls; made it look easy. I haven't seen that too many times this year, especially when you're playing the other side of second. I thought maybe either one of the balls he hit might have been able to go out.

JOHNNY OATES: Probably surprised us. Our guys were pretty upbeat, I felt, the entire ballgame. Certainly giving up a three-run home run in the first inning, it's not the best thing in the world to happen to you. But our pitchers kept battling. Este gave us a good outing. Wetteland finished it up. It's been the same this whole series. Never got the offense going.

JOHNNY OATES: He threw well enough to win. We scored no runs. But I've seen Roger pitch when he was so intimidating with all of his stuff that I guess we all try to compare Roger to when Roger was the best. And we had some chances to score some runs tonight, and I'm not sure -- I know he's not 100 percent, watching him move around on the mound. You take that into consideration. The bottom line was he still put zeroes on the board.

JOHNNY OATES: I thought we did a pretty good job swinging the bats tonight. I think early in the ballgame, we hit -- we hit quite a few balls hard. That's part of the game. You'd like a few of them to go through. A couple of the line drives go through, maybe next time we win.

JOHNNY OATES: May I ask, tired from what? Just --.

JOHNNY OATES: Like the players are telling me, they were upset they had so many off days. They said they lost the continuity, having three off days. The last week in September, then only playing every other day for the playoffs; our guys have had right now six or seven off days in the last two weeks. That's what they're complaining about; that they didn't get to play enough. So I don't think the answer to your question is being tired.

JOHNNY OATES: I don't see it. Not in my eyes. I don't see it as a step backwards. I know that our goal is we want to move forward and win a World Championship, and I'm confident that it will happen here soon. And we'll let -- I'll just sit back and try to -- I have a few months to analyze what went on this playoff and see how we can score, it seems like, most of the year and yet, come to these three games, seems like we can't smell home plate.

JOHNNY OATES: Last time I tried to compare the Yankees to somebody else, I got in a lot of trouble in New York. You can't compare teams last year to another team. Last year's Yankee team was arguably, for those people in here old enough to have seen the 1904 Cubs, or whoever they were playing, I don't know if they're better than them. Last year's Yankees won 114 ball games, went through us, could have easily gone through Cleveland the same way, and did the National League Champion. Last year was a special year. In my mind, there's no comparison.

JOHNNY OATES: Not with the success we had during the summer. With Rafael in the middle, we had a lot of -- we were going to score some runs this year.

JOHNNY OATES: I think sometimes we got confused. We had a bunch of people tell them be more patient, be more patient, and we tried that the first game. We walked seven times; we got two hits. We did something right for the first 162 games. Now why do we have to change it the next three? We don't have to change a thing. But everybody started talking, said take more pitches, take more pitches. The press started writing it, and, hey, you've got to work the count more. Well, Clemens threw more pitches than Loaiza did tonight.

JOHNNY OATES: I don't know the answer to that. I'm going to let you analyze it tomorrow morning, and I'm going to take the next four months off.

JOHNNY OATES: Home.

JOHNNY OATES: Spring training. Do it again. Do it again. Try to tee it up again. In golf, you get Mulligan. Hopefully, most of us will be back next year and we'll get another Mully gain.

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