Lufkin is a tough place to play, much less sweep. I'm very proud of the effort we put out on the field today.

We're playing the way we're supposed to play and aren't doing anything crazy. Our pitchers are throwing strikes, our defense has only one error in the last four games and we're hitting the baseball, and I knew we had the talent to do it.

It's not a mystery, and there's no special formula to what we're doing. It's what every team strives to do, but our guys happen to be executing it well right now.

I was arguing the fact that the catcher had to go so high to get the ball and bring it down to tag our guy on the head. It was unfortunate the way things ended, but we shouldn't be caught in those situations. I probably should have pinch run for Mike in that situation, but I was thinking how tough it would have been had we gone extra innings without his bat in the lineup. It was a decision that didn't work out for us.

There was not a lot of fire in our team, and the results were indicative of that. I know we had a lot of guys out there who hadn't played in a while, so you can't expect immediate success. I'm not blaming them necessarily, but as a group, we didn't get at it today.

I was glad we were able to get Tyler his first conference action. I know it wasn't under a lot of pressure, but he came in and did what he was supposed to do. We had Cory (Farrell) ready to go in the bullpen.