Brocail, sporting a left hand wrapped in ice yesterday, explained
“Bunting practice,” Brocail said. “I got hit in the hand.”
Now, that’s a veteran. Punch the wall with your non-pitching hand guys.
As for the losing streak,
“It’s Murphy’s Law,” Brocail said. “Anything that can go wrong is going wrong. We’ve put in different lineups. We’ve run, we haven’t run. We score six, we give up seven. We score five, we give up six. At one point, it’s going to click back to where it was.” Link
Last Sunday Carlos Lee pined “…seems like May went away and we went away,” Link
But Cecil had a better idea. In a recent pre-game talk he advised the boys “All right, let’s show ’em what we got, guys! Get that fuckin’ stick in their side. Let ’em know you’re there! Get that lumber in his teeth. Let ’em know you’re there!” … wrong script, but he did hope they were upset about losing.
“You should be upset,” Cooper said. “There’s a lot of guys in there with a lot of pride. They don’t want to lose. They know we’ve got a good team and we should be winning. And they don’t want to lose. So they should be upset, and it’s good. You like it when a guy gets upset.” Link
Cooper said. “And we’re not going to settle for (losing) anymore. It won’t happen again. They don’t play hard, they don’t play. Simple.” Link
Lance counsels big boy panties and mental toughness, for the fans, the media, his teammates, and the coach. “I understand where (Cooper’s) coming from, …but I can tell you the guys in here are not laying down or giving up.”
“I think the media and the fans tend to view the season as some epic roller coaster where you have to do something to turn this or do that and then it goes downhill and eveybody’s like, ‘Oh the season’s lost.’ We as players don’t think in those grandiose terms. We think about we have another game against the Orioles on Tuesday, who’s going to start for them, what can you do to win that game. We’re not caught up in the snowball effect. Baseball’s a tough sport, you have to be mentally tough to succeed, and this is going to be a real test of our mental toughness.” Link