Ron Gardenhire Year Quotations

Lew is fine wherever you put him. He's going to play like Lew, he's going to hustle, run balls out and hopefully some of his balls will fall in. Last year he wasn't as lucky as he had been the year before. A lot of times hits will go down to being lucky, and this past year he wasn't quite as lucky.

Cuddy got better and better as the year went along last year, especially when we put him in the outfield. He relaxed a little bit. I'm sure he'll say no, but he seemed to do better there.

Last year, we missed too many opportunities. What hurt us more than anything last year was situational hitting, so if we can hit a ground ball to second in some of those situations to get a run in, we're going to be better off for it. That's what we are looking for, a little better situational hitting.

I'm sure there'll be a lot of people talking throughout the year about Puck. You can bet that we won't ever forget him.

He needs to go down and get everyday at-bats rather than sit up here on the bench. He's missed a year-plus of baseball. We brought him up here and kept him up awhile to see where he's at. He's doing pretty good after being out a year of baseball.

It's always nice to get out and talk to the people who help support us all year long.

Does he make a statement to be one of our pitchers for next year? We'll see how he does this year and we'll go from there.

It wasn't a perfect science earlier in the year with our pitching staff and Joe. There were issues. We sat down with the pitchers and we sat down with the catchers about how different guys like to pitch. That was something he had to learn.

The story has always been with him that he's a sloppy practice guy, but a good game guy. He's gotten better at his practice now, and a lot of people talked to him about that, working on some drills. He's grown up a little bit and made his presence known this year in camp.

It's been our Achilles' heel all year long. We have one of the best pitching staffs in baseball and we just can't support them offensively.

Him playing in Japan last year kind of leaves us a void here as to what he's going to look like. We were told he was in good shape here and ready to go. He's excited about being back here and he's excited about being back with the Twins, so those are all good things. If he comes here in shape and healthy, then he can be a big plus for our team.

We tried a hit-and-run (twice) last night. We got one of them right. That's better than the year before. I think that was more of a TV malfunction.

That's our Achilles' heel all year long. We've got one of the best pitching staffs in baseball and offensively, we just can't support them. That's why we're in the position we're in in our league, our division and this Wild Card race.

This is only the first month of the year here and we have a long ways to go, but we definitely have a lot of work to do. We have to pitch better; we have to hit better, and catch the ball better -- the whole package. That's why there can't be anybody pointing fingers in here, because it's a total package. We need an effort by the whole team to get better.

This year he's been very, very solid. As good as they get in this league. We haven't exactly scored a lot of runs. We know that. But he's backed it up.

We've probably had too many at the same time this year who've struggled.

We've got one position player left from my first year of managing here. One.

He's hasn't told me he needs to be shut down yet. We're playing him. As long as you can play. Everybody has issues this time of year -- believe me. Everybody is hurt. Everybody is playing hurt. If you're not, you probably didn't play very hard.

We need to make sure we're ready for next year for him. We don't want to mess with that thing. He's pitched on it long enough, and tonight he kind of tweaked it again.