**EVAN GATTIS
On the home run
“I fouled off some pitches and got one I could handle. Thank God it went out.”
You already comfortable in those situations, pinch-hitting with game on the line?
“Yeah, I like it. It reminds me of winter ball. I haven’t had that many at-bats with that kind of intensity, and I like it.”
On his trot around the bases
“The crowd, the intensity and all that, definitely a good feeling. It’s definitely a good moment, man. It’s a good feeling.”
On the scouting report he got from Reed Johnson and Justin Upton while reliever Jansen was warming up
“I wanted to make sure it was the right guy, because when he was running in I thought it was what’s-his-name, Bonifacio (Ronald Belisario). And it was it was Jansen. Throws a lot of cutters, and Justin has faced him a lot. I remember him saying something about him in the advance meeting, so I wanted to go and just talk to him and whatever info I could get going into an at-bat is going to help, especially at a time like that.”
On the home-run pitch
“It was kind of like a down-and-in cutter, a front-door cutter. Or a four-seam that just cut. I think the only true fastball he threw was the one up-and-in, I think the second pitch.”
**ANDRELTON SIMMONS
On Dodgers pitcher Kenley Jansen, whom he and Gattis homered off
“I played with him, too, a little bit, when we were growing up. As we got older, we got split (on different teams) because of the age difference. We didn’t play on the same team anymore.”
Pretty good scouting report on him?
“Yeah, they were talking about his pitches, saying he likes to throw that back-door cutter. So I was kind of looking for that, and he threw it first pitch. I’ve got to thank Gat for wearing him out a little bit. Made it easy.”
On Gattis
“He’s awesome. Just amazing. Pretty much all you can say. You saw it coming, but still, seeing it is awesome. He’s a great hitter. He’s always ready to go. He’s fun to watch.”
Does he have a special presence up there?
“Oh, yeah, especially in those tight situations. He’s done it a couple of times already this year. He hasn’t even played that long, so…. It’s fun to watch, every time.”
On Simmons hitting some balls hard recently but not getting results until today
“It’s nice to see the work pay off with results. It’s always nice getting big hits in tight games.”
You knew Jansen how long in Curacao?
“Since I was 4. I played with him till I was, like, 7 maybe? It was fun. Played against him a couple of times on select teams. He threw me out as a catcher one time. Never again ran on him.”
**KRIS MEDLEN
How good did it feel to pitch that well for seven innings?
“It was great. The three walks, I think one of them was a competitive walk, the late one to Punto. But overall I felt awesome. At San Francisco I was leaving the ball up. Today if I missed, I missed down. That was huge for myself. Just tried competing. Obviously Capuano had a great game today. Real tough (outcome) for him, but I think that’s our offense in a nutshell – shutting us out for the entire game. One inning, just waiting for our offense to explode.
“How fitting is it that B.J. got it started? I think it was awesome for him to get a hit and get on base for us, and you’ve got Gat coming up and you obviously have the faith that he’s going to get it done. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind, he definitely wasn’t going to get cheated, but he was going to put some swings on it. He faced a tough pitcher and got the pitch that he wanted, and absolutely crushed it. And Andrelton followed with some breathing room, and Craig did his thing.”
Confidence in Gattis already in that situation?
“I think you have confidence in your teammates all the time, but he kind of already has the track record with two months in the big leagues. So yeah, obviously he puts some good at-bats together. Any time he swings the bat he’s got a chance to do what he did tonight.”
On going seven innings, season-high 112 pitches
“I really wanted to sack up in that seventh inning and have a clean inning. Talking to myself on the mound, just trying to get through it. I threw a lot more pitches that I usually do, but I wanted to be in there, and I wanted to battle for the game. Obviously we lost O (Eric O’Flaherty) today. You want to try and go deep in the games when you’re short in the ‘pen. It worked out for us.”
On seeing O’Flaherty earlier in the day
“He was walking around bummed, just like all of us. But we’ve got a lot of guys on this team who’ve gone through that (TJ surgery) and he’s going to be fine.”
**FREDI GONZALEZ
Does it surprise you, a rookie coming through in such big situations like Gattis has?
“Well a rookie, a young kid but I take it back. we always say he’s a young kid, he’s a guy who’s been around a little bit. He’s 26 years old and he likes these moments it seems like. There was nobody in our dugout tonight that wouldn’t want him up in that situation. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t really even have to hit the ball square to hit it the ball out of the ballpark and obviously that’s what we were looking for tonight there and he gave it to us and Simmons to be able to add on an extra run there in the ninth inning was even better. Medlen was outstanding. I thought we were going to come in tonight and talk about another day that he didn’t get any run support, and he didn’t but he still pitched a heck of a ballgame.”
On how big of a hit it was for B.J. Upton
“When he gets on base and any time you get a knock when you’re struggling like that, I think it’s always good momentum for the next day and just keep going forward. Right now a broken bat single, a hit batter with the bases loaded will work. Just mentally to get him involved in the game and hopefully his last hit and last at-bat will get him going a little bit. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Does Gattis have a presence in that batter’s box that’s a lot of guys don’t?
“He’s a big strong guy. He’s got a spread-out stance, that there’s not a lot of moving parts to it. He’s strong as an ox and you’ve got to make pitches to him. He brings a reputation from the minor leagues that he doesn’t strike out much even though he’s done a little bit more here than we have seen in the minor leagues, but that’s the minor leagues and here it’s the big leagues. It’s a different story. If you make a mistake, he can run you out of the ballpark from foul pole to foul pole.”
On difficulty to find him spot in lineup but nice to run him out off bench
“It’s almost better. You can put him anywhere you want in any situation. But sooner or later we need to get him three or four at-bats. You can’t go from pinch hit to pinch hit and survive in the big leagues.”
Did Medlen seem to pitch like he knew situation at hand with short bullpen?
“Medlen’s going to go out and pitch and he don’t – I think he was ready for one of these games. You saw it in his prior starts. You’ve seen four or five innings, two or three innings, now we saw seven innings of him being the Medlen we saw last year. We saw it the whole game and hopefully that’ll continue on to his next start.”
On how he’ll use setup guys in the eighth inning:
“I think it’s going to be case-by-case. I think it’s going to be a matchup situation with Avilan and Gearrin. We let Gearrin face the pitcher or right-handed hitter because they only had right-handers coming up in the ninth hole if they chose to do that. We were going to let him go all the way through Kemp and then bring Avilan in to face the left-handers.”
On Gattis being not just powerful, but fouling off two-strike pitches, etc.
“He had a hell of an at-bat. He wasn’t going to give in. It’s still too early to say this guy likes those type of moments but boy it sure does, when he’s had some history with it, he comes up big
