AL DIVISION SERIES: INDIANS v YANKEES

October 2, 1997

Joe Torre

JOE TORRE: Good question. It looked like he was in good shape early in the game, making good pitches, and everything got elevated in that five-run inning. Because we could have helped him playing a little better defensively, but he just didn't locate the ball as well.

JOE TORRE: Not really, because he struck out the next hitter. To me, that was a pretty good indication. And he got the two strikes on Justice. I don't think he was unnerved by it. I think he may have been -- the runner was going to get the first. The error just enabled him to get the third.

JOE TORRE: Well, basically, I just went on numbers; Boggs' numbers against Mesa and Stanley's numbers against Mesa. At that point in time when I used Boggs I was looking for contact, because he just gave me one run closer. With the top of the order coming up, I get a base hit, I'm satisfied. That was basically it, just on the numbers.

JOE TORRE: Yeah. He's like 5 to 12, Cecil was like 5 to 30 with 13 strikeouts.

JOE TORRE: We got the most, walked three and scored them. But that kid has good stuff. It's understandable he'd be nervous. But he settled in. And he could strike you out. He could get you to the ground ball. That's a very unusual combination. But he was very strong.

JOE TORRE: I don't know if shock is the right word. That's pretty strong. He's pitching against a pretty good ball club. They made some adjustments on them. And the fact is he didn't locate as well as he did early on. But the ball that Chad misjudged, that inning ends 3-3. So it wasn't totally Andy. And everybody is entitled to an inning. And just a five-run inning became a little much for us.

JOE TORRE: Well, I guess we won the game they should have won yesterday, and it was vice-versa today. Baseball is unpredictable. Anytime you think you have something rolling, there's the team across the field that seems to do something to you. We haven't done anything easy. And we're not planning on expecting anything to be given to us. We have to go to Cleveland and win two out of three. We're capable of doing it, obviously. We keep bouncing back. We had a couple of opportunities late in the game. We couldn't get the job done, but we keep fighting.

JOE TORRE: He's at a pretty good streak right now. He's swinging the bat well, he's on the ball. He's not trying to pull the ball. And out here, in batting practice, he was hitting a lot of home runs, a lot of balls out of the ballpark in batting practice today. He is seeing the ball really well and feels good. Just hopefully it continues.

JOE TORRE: I think probably the same reasons that they were successful against Andy, the location. He just didn't make good pitches against us and we took advantage of it. He's a good pitcher. We can't assume we're going to beat him up like we've beaten him up before. He's pitched big games before. We just have to go in there and have our guy, Wells, pitch a good ballgame. We're swinging the bat well. We're aggressive. I like that. And, again, we've been through this before.

JOE TORRE: I'm not going to make any comment.

JOE TORRE: I'm not making any comment. That's all I said.

End of FastScripts….