If you're going to pick somebody, I don't think you could have picked a better person to follow Bernie Williams than Johnny Damon.

You don't want to pick your opponents because you never know what's going to happen. The Red Sox certainly are a club that you don't take lightly. We never have and we certainly understand the danger of playing this club.

[You don't even know what you would call this grammatical two-step. (Fourth person? First person once removed?) But you hear coaches and player do it all the time. It's a subtle way for them to keep from owning up to what they think and letting us inside their heads. So a few weeks ago, instead of saying] I really want to kick Boston's ass ... You're looking forward to winning games.

That's the sign of a good relationship, when you can pick up a phone and it doesn't matter when the last time you spoke was.

I don't want to say he got used to it, but I think he understood this year, with his reduced role, that this is what he should be concentrating on. That doesn't mean he's not valuable.

He's asking me what I think, and I said, 'You interviewed, I didn't,' ... He's very intelligent. He's poised to make a decision. He's welcome to come back here as a bench coach.