I’m looking forward to spearheading this ball club to back to some of the days when the Pittsburgh Pirates were somebody you really had to deal with. I’m very anxious in making the players understand...

When you face guys of that caliber, your starters have to believe they are equal to the task. One thing I know about both Oliver and Zach is they believe that. They do more than...

It was a great pitch. There’s only one guy in the game that could have hit it.

Can you teach a guy to have soft hands or can you teach somebody to be Jack Wilson or Jose Castillo? I think that’s a little difficult. But can you teach somebody the sense of...

We won’t talk about that tonight.

He has been doing extremely well with this [rehab] program with his shoulder, and is throwing. We’re going to continue to allow our medical people to finish the job with that. But in the meantime...

When half of the team is the pitching staff, there are some intangible things that are important. We can sit here and talk about hitting all we want. But that won’t help the other part...

He had the left hip labrum reattached and he had some debris cleaned out of his socket.

We’re going to speed Duff up and get him some at-bats. We’ve just got to catch up a little bit.

No, I was not fired. I don’t believe it was in my best interest or the best interests of the Los Angeles Dodgers to be in the dugout (in 2006) as a lame duck manager.

I think everybody worked together well on this,

If I don’t get it done here I’ll feel like I’ve failed. I’m one of the spokes in the wheel that will turn this organization around.

Mentally, he was a few years ahead of everyone he was playing with.

Ian Snell made an adjustment from what he was doing early on and got the ball down to where he could be very effective. He forced the opposition to have to swing the bat. He...

We played well enough on this road trip to win some of those games. We still have to address some of those little things that kept us from winning, but we were right in every...

When the first pitch of the game gets thrown, we’ve got four games to try to win. I’m certainly interested in doing that now that I am sitting in this office.

You don’t want to get too overly involved in velocity at this point. You want to give him a chance to stretch his arm out.

Who will step up? That’s the question. And how consistently can we work the process?

I would be hard-pressed to believe that.

He had a shooting pain that was really bothering him.

Giving up four or five runs through five innings with your starter … that’s a lot of runs to give up and expect to win.

Our golden opportunity was in the seventh inning. We had the bases loaded, we had one out, we had a 3-1 count and we just didn’t get it done.

It’s very flattering, if you get right down to that,

He has a tremendous baseball mind. When I have someone like that sitting next to me, I feel confident there is not too much that’s going to get by us during the course of a...

You don’t take a rookie and give him a second All-Star break, … If it’s Eric Gagne it’s a completely different story, but Eric Gagne wasn’t that way when he first started. Eric Gagne would...

The term is willingness. We can have a lot of information that may help them as people and players. But it’s a two-way street. You have to be receptive to the information. You have to...

Tonight’s another case of what we’ve been dealing with the last few days. We pitched well enough to win, but didn’t hit well enough to win.

I’m anxious to see the real Oliver Perez. I want to see him step forward and become the Oliver Perez I know he is. What he did in 2005 is not anywhere near what he...

You make bad pitches to Major League hitters, they put the fat part of the bat on the ball. When you are involved in games like that, regardless of what stages it’s at, you don’t...

I won’t say where they are going to start. But he is the type of guy we are looking for to hopefully place in between two left-handers that have somewhat similar stuff and not give...

That’s basically what it boiled down to.

The great thing about Roberto Hernandez is he understands the concept of what we’re trying to implement here. Stay within the framework of what’s being drawn up to create that continuity.

I mean, how do you play winning baseball that way? I challenge players to understand how the game’s played.

The last five or six games, I’ve been doing some things that go against the norm of what I usually do,

When you have somebody who has his type of energy, who brings that to the table like he does, the potential is there to strike quickly like that.

The allure, for me, was, No. 1, the stability of the front office. The other thing was looking at a group of players I’d managed against the past couple of years and realizing there’s some...

It’s an old clich ”© that guys who aren’t the most talented players make good managers and teachers, … I fall into that category … I had to do a lot of listening and learning...

There have to be days where someone takes you deep [into a game]. There has to be a day every once in a while where someone doesn’t even have any of [the relief pitchers] out...

I thought he battled. He didn’t have his breaking ball until his last two innings. That’s a tough club to pitch against with basically just your fastball.

Zach, to me, it’s very easy to see. The thing that was pronounced as a result of his timing being off a little bit, the life of his fastball wasn’t there.

He had a few more three-ball counts — too many — than I’d like to see. That puts him in a vulnerable position.

Any time you face a pitcher the caliber of Chris Carpenter, you get one opportunity against him. He started quick and it took us until the seventh to get our opportunity to crack through.

You can’t ask a group of players to play any harder than they have for two days and, especially tonight, take the kind of at-bats that we took all night long.

That was his game to determine. It was his baseball game at that point. You have to give him the opportunity to finish it.

I don’t think any of us should spend a whole lot of time being concerned with that. The way it gets better and becomes much more attractive to look at is to address (problem areas).

It’s one more thing we have to deal with this year and one thing we have to bring into next season.

He was completely on top of his game, … I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s been the workhorse of the staff.

It’s nothing that surprised us. It’s all pre-existing. After they do those two spots, depending on how the progress is with his left wrist, they may have to do something with that, too.

Zach Duke, uncharacteristic of him, threw 46 pitches in the first two innings [of his first start]. The difference was the damage wasn’t as significant.

I’m certainly wondering about the one two-strike pitch that got called a ball. I’m really wondering about that one.