Would it be a nice to get Familia back out there?
No question about it. Matter of fact, these are the times you’ve got to do it. Not just for tonight, just for the whole future. You’ve got to get him back out there. It’s a tough spot, but he needs to be back out there. Yeah, perfect scenario is to look up and have Jake hand the ball to Familia and let him start the ninth inning and go at them again.
What’s Colon and Niese’s availability tonight?
Colon won’t be available. One of the reasons why we took Jon out when we did is we thought we might need him tonight, so we wanted to limit him a little bit. So he’s probably still available. But Bartolo will not be.
Did you talk with Familia about the quick pitch? How important is it for him to have that?
Well, once again, he’s been really effective with it. Try to throw a split off it last night, you know, again, by the rushing he didn’t stay on top and left it up. The one thing you want to try to do though is not, when you quick pitch, not just use one pitch. He just left it up.
As we know in sports, again, the game is played by great, great talented players who once in a while make mistakes. He made a mistake, he just didn’t get the ball where he wanted it to. He paid the price for it. And that’s what happens when you play good teams.
I try not to say, Don’t use that anymore, because it’s been an effective move for him. So we’ve got to realize when you do it, if you’re going to miss, you’ve got to miss in the dirt, not in the middle of the strike zone.
How has Juan Lagares handled coming off the bench and spot starting?
Anytime I talked to him about it he said, I’ll be ready, I’ll be ready tonight when you need me. And he always has been. When you look back at the last two or three games that he’s played, he’s had as good at-bats as anybody in the lineup. So I’ve got him in there. Johnny, tough on everybody, but the numbers right-handed hitters have against him are a lot better than lefties. This is a perfect opportunity to see if Juan can stay hot, because we need him.
Harvey threw a lot fewer fastballs than usual, was it not up to snuff or respect for way Royals hit the fastball?
TI think it was a little bit of a quality of both. I think Matt knew early he wasn’t real sharp. We also know they hunt the heater early in the counts. He wasn’t making pitches with his fastball, so I think he went with his secondary stuff. I think that’s why late in the game you saw him fatigued because he had to work so hard.
Originally it was not, Hey, look, let’s just make some pitches. The first pitch of the game, the game plan was to come in here, and he left it out over the plate. That was an immediate example of, wow, we’ve got to make pitches against these guys.
Mets have bounced back all season long, what is it about their resiliency?
Well, again, I always go back to the leadership in the clubhouse. That means so much when you have a young team. And these guys, they’ve been here, they’ve been in Postseason, they’ve been through tough times. They know what it takes. They know not to get too high when things are going good. And last night when the game was over not be dragging in when they’re coming in, pouting, throwing their equipment in the clubhouse.
It was one game. We have six more to play. We had a chance to win the game, we didn’t win it. Well, let’s get another chance tomorrow night. Let’s put ourselves in the same situation. And I think that leadership spreads.
Was Wright running on his own in the ninth inning with Murphy up?
Well, once again, we’re handing out scouting reports, I don’t like to do that. He’s got to pitch tonight, same guy, might come out tonight. He ran out of pitches. …We thought he was safe, and obviously he wasn’t.
I know Dan is swinging good. But they have a decision to make, do they want to face him or Cespedes? In that situation we kind of liked the chance of seeing if we can get a guy in scoring position to add on a run, and they just threw him out.
Regardless of what happens tonight Noah is going to be pitching a huge game when you guys get back home.
First of all, he’s a very fast learner. I’ve told you guys all season long, the most impressive thing I saw from Noah Syndergaard when he first got called to the Major Leagues, and we’ve got DeGrom, we’ve got Harvey, very similar guys, he stood next to our pitching coach night after night, saying, Matt threw his slider in that count, is that be a good pitch for me to throw or should I do this or that? Trying to learn how he’s going to be successful.
Because of that he’s trying to study the game and learn how he can be better, he has no fear. He believes he belongs here. And that speaks volumes. When you’ve got that kind of stuff and you’re not afraid to throw it and you’re not afraid to give up a hit because you think you can get the next guy out, you can get dangerous. Noah just got better and better and better as the season went along with the confidence he had that he could be successful here. It all comes with his desire to get better.
Is starting Lagares based on defense, did last night play into it?
This has nothing to do with the first play last night. Both guys I thought had a shot to catch it. Michael, he was there, he thought he heard Yo call for it, so he backed off. The ball could have been caught. The same thing could happen if Juan Lagares was out there, same exact play.
I thought tonight we were looking at the matchups with Johnny Cueto, that’s my first and foremost thing. Right-handers hit this guy better. And secondly, you look at if you’re going to put him in the game, so you can DH Conforto, and then the ballpark comes into play, and the wind tonight comes into big play. We knew it was going to be windy. We just said, Look, we’ll put him out there and we can always — if the situation comes where he’s got to face Wade Davis, he may have to hit. We’ll worry about that towards the end of the game.
