AL DIVISION SERIES: INDIANS v YANKEES

October 2, 1997

Mike Hargrove

MIKE HARGROVE: Once I found my voice -- Mark Wiley and I both talked to him. Not extensively, just what is gone is gone, go out and throw your stuff, nothing extra, nothing anything more than that. Just be you and let things happen that are going to happen. Anyway, he went out and threw strikes and was very good.

MIKE HARGROVE: Yeah, I think that Joe's probably right. It almost makes you a little nervous if you break out on top right away. Anytime in baseball if you score a lot of runs early, I don't mean 10 or 11, but 3, 4, 5, runs the first couple of innings, unless you add on fairly soon after that, you let the other team mentally back in the game and score a run here or there and start getting momentum, as we did when we scored the five. I think it happened to both teams. It happened to us in Game 1. I think it's what happened to the Yankees in Game 2.

MIKE HARGROVE: The way he finished the 6th inning with a strikeout, he pitched a strong 6th inning, he was going to go back out for the 7th. He was at a hundred pitches. If you have followed our team at all this year, for those of you who have, you'll know that consistently this year when our pitchers have gotten -- our starting pitchers have gotten us in at the 6th inning and been at a hundred pitches or more, and if there's a long rest between that inning and -- ending and the next one starting, we usually go with our bullpen. That -- Jaret was at a hundred pitches. He pitched the 6th inning. He really had done his job. And the cool temperature, and he sat a long time, we felt the best thing for us at that point in time, the ball club and Jaret, was to go to the bullpen.

MIKE HARGROVE: Well, I'm not jumping up and down with joy right now, but I think that in Game 1 and 2 our bullpen struggled a little bit. But I think knowing them and their track record, I feel pretty good about our bullpen. I think we have a couple of weaknesses in our bullpen, but I think that we have people that can adjust to those -- recover from those weaknesses, so we'll see.

MIKE HARGROVE: Charlie Nagy has been good for us for a lot of years, he really has. I know he hasn't had a lot of success this year against the Yankees, but I think, as you've seen the last two games, that the playoffs are entirely a different deal. And so I'm looking very much forward to Charlie pitching for us. Charlie has carried the load for our ball club, as I said, for a while, and I don't know how confident you can be in these playoffs as whacky as these games have been so far. But we feel good with Charlie pitching for us, as I'm sure that the Yankees feel good about David Wells' pitches for them. I think both clubs are not approaching this game overconfident by any stretch of the imagination. Both clubs know we've got our work cut out for us, and we'll go with that.

MIKE HARGROVE: Well, I'm sure that Jaret was scared to death that first inning. I know that I was (LAUGHTER.) Not really. I felt all along that if Jaret could get by the first inning, that he had a good chance of doing what he did. And that's what we've seen from -- when I said earlier that he reminds me of a young Roger Clemens, that's what I was talking about. Obviously he has great stuff. But I was talking about the ability that he has not to lose his focus, composure. He projects a very good image or positive image, aggressive image to the other team. And we saw all those things after the first inning. Really saw it in the first inning. But once he got past the first inning, he got the ball down the strike zone, got a lot of ground balls, struck out a few people, showed everybody else really what we've been saying all along, this kid has a chance to be something very, very special.

MIKE HARGROVE: Yeah, a couple, three guys that were sitting right behind our dugout had been fairly abusive the whole game. But it turned a little vicious and a little foul toward the end of the game. I asked the guards to see what they could do to keep those guys quiet. People have the right to say what they want to say, but you don't need to hear that kind of stuff.

MIKE HARGROVE: I think Pettitte was surprised how fast it turned on him, as Eric Plunk was surprised how fast it turned on him. The situations were very similar. Andy Pettitte doesn't usually allow that to happen. He's a tremendous pitcher, a tremendous athlete, and we're glad tonight's over.

End of FastScripts….