Quotations

«I thought it was pretty obvious that he's not ready to be on the field. We don't need to force him into something he's not ready for.»

«This is a day where our player development staff should be very proud. A lot of people did a great job, and you see it with those pitchers.»

«The goal is to wear a ring at the end.»

«We have depth and I think we all hope the glass will remain half-full. Usually, it's somewhere in between. I think we're trying to guard against if we have someone with an injury or someone who's not throwing well, it's not going to cost us a lot of games. I think when you think you have too much pitching, you still don't. I think you have to guard against that and I think we've done a very good job of that.»

«We try not to get carried away with batting averages and statistics. There's going to be some kid in here this spring who knocks everybody's socks off and he's probably still going to go to Double-A. That is just Spring Training and how it can be.»

«If we could have put our finger on it, we would have done it right then and there. I think it's always a combination of things. He got smoked [by the Crawford liner], and that didn't help. His fastball and his slider, for whatever reason, ran together for a period there and took away some of his effectiveness. And then to top it off, he had a bad game in Chicago that everybody remembers. I tend to remember that we also had a guy that pitched in the All-Star Game. The whole season counts. I know everybody remembers how you finish, and it's important, but we've still got a pretty good pitcher.»

«The idea for David for the next two weeks is to do his work inside, whatever conditioning he's doing with the trainers. He'll do his long toss. But he's trying not to weight-bear his conditioning for another two weeks.»

«I didn't think he would be traded. I didn't think it was realistic. He's too good. Theo (Epstein) and management tried to honor that (request), but they couldn't get enough back.»

«Oh yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm OK with this. In a perfect world, everybody shows up [Thursday] and nobody is a pound overweight and nobody does this. But it's not a perfect world. We're dealing with a lot of personalities, but it's going to work out by doing it this way. It's going to work out better.»

«Again, I think the way I view it is, he's our player and we want to get the most out of him. Sometimes you make some adjustments along the way and you try to understand some people's thinking and you try to get to the same goal together, and I think that's what we're trying to do, and I think this is going to be just fine.»