When you're hot, you want to keep playing. You don't want to have the kind of break in the schedule that we just had.

Before the Olympic break he was struggling a little bit, as was the team. I think the break rejuvenated him. Knowing that Dom was injured and he was going to get some playing time helped him relax.

I don't know if we think it's going to be an easy schedule when we are playing teams like Columbus and Chicago. These guys are playing good. They're playing better than us ? better than a lot of teams right now.

I don't know what the coach before was thinking when he set the schedule. We are just playing some teams that are out of our league.

When Lofton came into the dugout, he said it was hard to see anything that had any kind of break to it, ... He and Jimmy were giving me info. When I went up there [to bat], it was the same thing. You could see everything straight on a plane, but anything that started up and went down, there was no shot at seeing. I just tried to roll with that.

You kind of see if they were playing, how they did, and it's always good when they lose.