As seen on FS Wisconsin:
How do you explain the lack of quality starting pitching in this series?
Combination of a good offensive team in St. Louis and us not commanding the baseball. You can't get away with mistakes to them, we made way too many mistakes.
Is that the hardest part?
Yeah, it is tough. You go into the playoffs, we talk about it all the time: Things need to go your way. You need to play well, you need to get breaks. We didn't pitch as well. Offensively I thought we were pretty good, although we couldn't touch their bullpen. Their bullpen came in and we didn't do much against them. But you know, that pitching, it got us here. I know some of them aren't happy with their performances but over the year, outstanding. And for the five guys, I thought they did a great job.
Did Shaun Marcum do anything differently today?
He had a different game plan going into it, but was never really able to get to that game plan. They were some kind of team in that first inning. We couldn't get away with anything...we didn't make good pitches, but we just never had a chance to get into our comfort zone, into a rhythm, except for Wolfie's (Randy Wolf) start, which was outstanding. But they just didn't let up on us.
On the decision to start Marcum:
I still know it was the right decision. I'm not second-guessing anything there. It was the right decision. With the options that we had, these guys pitched well all year, I still thought they had good starts in them. I was expecting that to happen today, as well as a lot of the other games we didn't pitch well. I like all five of them. I'll go through a season anywhere with those five starters.
On Prince Fielder:
Having a guy hitting fourth for you that can do the things he can do: Average, on base percentage, power, ribbies (RBI), leader in the clubhouse, it's hard to say where we'd be without him this year. Huge part of why we're here. But he's a force. When he gets it going, boy, he can do a lot of damage.
Overall perspective on team:
Like I talked about playoffs, you don't know what's going to happen in the playoffs. The hardest thing is to get there. You get in the playoffs, you get hot and you can roll through the playoffs. St. Louis is hot. Did they do anything wrong in the series? That's incredible to go through a series and have every single thing they do go right. And you can't stop that. That's what you have to have happen in the playoffs. You have to have breaks that you create because you're playing good, which they did. They outplayed us. They're a good team and they outplayed us.
Hard to take two bad games to end the season?
I don't know if I'd call today a bad game. We swung the bats well. We scored six runs today. Usually with our pitching six runs? I'd be happy with that and I'd think we're going to come out with a victory. But unfortunately they were swinging the bats a little bit better.
On the challenge of coming from behind:
Yeah, it is hard to get behind in the first inning like we did. But in two of the games we bounced back well. Today's game we bounced back and shoot, we're right in it again. And then we let it get away and we bounced back, but we couldn't keep it up...we couldn't keep bouncing back with all the runs they were getting.
How do you measure this season?
There's lots of goals. I don't think the goal when you start a season is to say "We need to get to the World Series." The goal is to win your division. You're playing in 162 games to get into the playoffs, that's what your goal is. And we reached that goal. We reached another goal when we got past the first round. We didn't reach the ultimate goal, which is to get to the World Series. We fell two games shy of that. I'm happy with our season. I'm happy with a bunch of guys. I was certainly blessed to be able to manage not just a great team but a great bunch of young men.
On having Chris Narveson in the bullpen:
Yeah, I think it was nice knowing that Narvy (Chris Narveson) was going to be there if we needed to. Certainly I was hoping we wouldn't get to needing him so early, but you don't know what's going to happen with your pitchers when they go out there. They have a pretty good pitching staff and we got to all of their starters. So it's just a matter of them coming in with a bullpen that was really throwing the ball well, and they were able to do it in almost every game.