It's been a tough 12 hours for our organization. The great news is that Jiri Fischer is doing very, very well.

Everybody knows they've been here. It was national news.

So the pressure is on Kerry to meet expectations. And let's not forget the good news for the White House in this poll: Bush is still seen as a stronger leader who would better deal with Iraq and terrorism,

We like our nucleus, the core of young players we have. We'd like to build something here. We want to be in position to add in the future, when the ages of unrestricted free agency goes down.

I negotiated from May 2004 to early September 2004 with them and we were so far apart at that point in time that I guess I was figuring if we picked up where we left off we were a long ways apart, ... We'll see what happens.

Given our recent history with groin injuries, they tend to take a little longer than you think. We've had players come back, feel OK, and then re-injure themselves.