253 Quotes by Tony Russa

You can do anything you want with him. You can hit-and-run with him, bunt. We push the game with him quite a bit.

If you look at last year, we had Scott playing and he had some really big hits, but overall he was really banged up, he wasn't the same the last two months, ... This year we lost four regulars, three of them are boppers, and the guys that took their place did a terrific job of handling the bat, so we played a little different game.

When you're talking about the best first five years in major league history, how's that not huge? Whether it's 100 RBIs, the .300 batting average or 30 homers, it's huge ... it's historic. We're not going to be cool about that one. We just saw history. I don't think you see history in this game that often. When you see it, you applaud it.

We've won the division, and I think he's lost a little mental edge as far as concentration,

If you could look ahead knowing those key guys would miss so much time, you'd really stretch to think you could pull it off.

We had excellent chances to add and we missed. That makes the game have a bad smell when you miss a point once or twice.

When he makes pitches, he can pitch against anybody. When he doesn't, he's vulnerable.

In the eighth inning, we missed our location three times, twice when we were ahead in the count. We almost caught a break -- Cabrera's ball was tagged, but it fooled Walker. That would have been an important break to catch. Matt got the ball up with a 1-2 count, and the pitch that Delgado tripled on wasn't where Ray was trying to throw it. Against good clubs in key situations, either you do or you don't, and if you don't, you get penalized most of the time.

Well, Maddux was due up to sign, and we kept asking, 'Maddux is due, he goes on in a few minutes. Where's Greg? Where's Greg.' And we turned around, and he's there. He had come up, his glasses on, and he walked right through the crowd and nobody saw that it was Greg Maddux. He didn't put on any airs. He was so natural.