Von Hayes Last Quotations

He's made some adjustments. He hadn't played in a while and he missed all of last year basically. He's a good hitter, we know that. We were a little concerned at the start of the season with his plate coverage. We talked about it a little bit, saw it a little bit in spring training. But sometimes you have to let guys find out for themselves.

It's going to be a good year. I'm comfortable with the guys we have and some of the guys that are below us in case we get into trouble injury-wise or guys get sent out of here. There's no reason why we shouldn't be equally as competitive as we were last year.

We need to work through it and get back on course. I definitely feel like we're an above-average team, but the way we've played the last two nights we're very mediocre. These guys should look in the mirror and see themselves as not a first place team.

Lloyd's been battling himself the last few days. He came into the office a few days ago just talking, trying to get him to think in simple terms ... not try to do too much. Pick somebody out in the infield and try to hit it as hard as you can at that person. He made a great adjustment (Friday) and did a great job for us.

With Suzuki, we should have quicker games because we don't have to hold the runners on as much as we used to. Kurt's going to give us something behind the plate that we didn't see last year. That's not taking anything away from the people we've had but times don't lie. His times throwing to second base are consistently around 1.9 to 1.92 (seconds).