Ron Gardenhire Hit Quotations

We're doing fine. I'm not going to start messing around with guys' brains. In time, he'll hit cleanup. We've said that before.

Three runs in seven innings, that's pretty good pitching, really. He pitched his tail off. Hernandez just pitched better. We didn't swing the bats well tonight. We hit a few balls hard. He definitely shut us down. It was a disappointing night for us.

Last year, we missed too many opportunities. What hurt us more than anything last year was situational hitting, so if we can hit a ground ball to second in some of those situations to get a run in, we're going to be better off for it. That's what we are looking for, a little better situational hitting.

He had good deception tonight. The ball was going in there pretty good, he made some pitches. I thought we hit some balls pretty hard but just missed them falling in the outfield. But he pitched good enough and mixed it up good enough to beat us.

He's getting better pitches to hit. That's what happens when you start swinging well. The pitcher makes mistakes and you hit it instead of fouling it off.

He didn't play well here. He didn't hit the ball great, he didn't play great defense, but that's not the Bret Boone that we all know. He's a very classy young man. I have a lot of respect for him.

I think we only hit one or two hard, and then the big lefty Sisco came in and that was that.

We really didn't have much of a chance. Carlos (Silva) got hit pretty hard and Joe (Mays) couldn't get anything down and they killed him. When you are down that much offensively, it's tough to get back in it.

Everybody keeps saying it was a terrible year, but those weren't too bad of numbers. But he did struggle. He got hit in the head early and had a rough spring because of his winter with so many illnesses. Overall, if you look at it, he's got a lot of things that he can improve upon offensively.

And that's a pretty good formula. You get your starter to go eight or nine innings and you hit three-run homers. Normally it works out pretty good.

You take the good and bad when you're talking about a power hitter. We're looking for someone who's going to hit those three-run homers and get you back into a game or blow the game open. He's a guy that has that ability.

You might see him go 0 for 10 with eight strikeouts and then hit three home runs. He's going to let it fly.

They kind of whacked us around. Joe was up in the zone and they pretty much hit everything he threw up there. And that's a pretty good formula. You get your starter to go eight or nine innings and you hit three-run homers. Normally it works out pretty good.

It was a hit in the gap, so it wasn't like he had to beat a play to home, but he was running good. His legs feel good.

I want to protect him the best I can and we'll go from there. He's doing the drills and he's doing fine, but I don't want to kill him. I think breaking him in slowly by allowing him to hit and then eventually getting him into the outfield is the right thing to do.

It was a disappointing series. They just killed us. They ran balls down in the gap and the ones they hit fell in. They were able to find the holes and we couldn't.

It was good to win the series and take two of three against one of the hotter teams. We had some big hits. Redmond was huge and Shannon had a big hit for us. We need to keep winning series.

If you have two different theories for where you hit in the lineup, you're a pretty good hitter.

You could tell he got frustrated after the big one out there in the gap, where he gives up three more. You know he's frustrated and then he makes a couple more pitches up and they hit a couple of bullets off him. So he's just frustrated right now. He makes a good pitch, they hit it, makes a bad pitch, they hit it. It's just not working out for him right now.

This is only the first month of the year here and we have a long ways to go, but we definitely have a lot of work to do. We have to pitch better; we have to hit better, and catch the ball better -- the whole package. That's why there can't be anybody pointing fingers in here, because it's a total package. We need an effort by the whole team to get better.