We've always had a lot of respect for him. He pitched so well against us for Houston. He went out there last year with some discomfort and gutted out his starts in Boston. He's a winning-type guy. He's a winning pitcher who, when he's out there, he wins you games.
Obviously, we both feel it's a great situation, a great city. We feel like we had a couple good years and had a hiccup last year.
I have a lot of fondness in my heart for Corey. I feel badly at what happened last year. I certainly will try to do what's best for the Cubs first and what's best for Corey second.
He understood. We kept him until the end. There aren't too many times when a non-roster guy gets more than 45 at-bats. You could tell in the last week, he was trying to get four hits every at-bat.
He has physically never looked better to me. He's probably 10, 15 pounds lighter than last year and is just in great shape. He's done as much precautionary preparation work as anyone could. He has already been throwing and gotten ahead of where he usually would be at this time.
It didn't work the way we all would have liked for Holly this year. But it was never out of lack of effort by him. He gave us a heck of a first 40 percent last year and never got back on the field after the injury.
We are anxious to see how Scott is after he had a very solid closing career going for a while. He started to show glimpses of some good stuff last September. He should be much better because he will be six months farther away from the surgery.
I've never had any doubt that Dusty wanted to be here. All those things that were going around last year - he felt bad about it. He talked to me on two or three occasions and never expressed anything to me but that he wanted to be here.
The Sox were the best team in baseball and they deserved to win -- I'm happy for them. But whether the Sox won the World Series or not, we won 79 games last year and that's not acceptable.
It's a process of looking back over three years. There were a couple years when Will didn't pitch. And he pitched about three-quarters of the season last year.
If he is not going to have a chance to be a full-time player, he is not going to be able to correct the things that led him to have a bad year last year. It was not a good fit for him to be a bench player here at this point, after what happened last year.