Manuel's Conference

Today the Mets held a conference introducing new manager Jerry Manuel. I have taken some notes, and have written down some quotes for those of you that did not hear it.

Notes:

• According to Jerry, the Mets clubhouse has leaders, mentioning Carlos Delgado. Manuel said that Carlos showed, "tremendous leadership down the stretch."
• On the offense, Jerry said that the Angels were the model team. He said that the Mets need to, "They need to put the game ahead of the individual performance." Basically stating that it's not how many hits you have, it's when you hit them.
  
• He can't wait to run his first Spring Training.
  
• Jerry has not watched any of the teams in the playoffs, he said he has been at Home Depot imporving his new house.
  

Quotes:

"I couldn't tell you how much is salvageable and how much is not. I do know that I've been without a couple pair of shoes. Our job is to get people back in their roles that we think that we signed them up for, and then evaluate from that point of view. But to put them in roles that they're not accustomed to is sometimes an unfair evaluation."

"You don't see a lot of guys that have statistical numbers play well in these championship series. What you see is usually the little second baseman or somebody like that carries off the MVP trophy that nobody expected him to do. That's because he's comfortable in playing that form of baseball, so therefore when the stage comes, it's not a struggle for him."

"We have to put a value on say, moving a runner over. We have to put a value on getting a bases on balls. We have to put a value on infield back, (getting a) ground ball that's sufficient to score a run. Those types of things have to be accented in order for us, in my opinion, to kind of get to the next level."

"That's not really how it works, and that's what we have to get away from. And that's going to have to be a different mind-set of the team in going forward. We must win and we must know how to win rather than win because we have statistical people. We have to win because we have baseball players that know and can understand the game."

"You get so many statistical people together, they put so many stats on paper, and they say, well, if you do this and you score this many runs, you do that many times, you'll be in the playoffs."

"We have to grow from every time that we get as close as we get and don't make it, and we have to review and kind of marinate on why we don't make it."