"Sometimes you get caught up in the moment. I wasn't thinking home run there. I was just thinking that he'd hit the ball in the gap somewhere and [Endy Chavez] could score from first [to tie the score]."
But why had Randolph used Floyd rather than have another player bunt?
"We had bases loaded for Carlos Beltran. Same scenario, right?" he said. "Just make believe I bunted. It would have been the same thing, right?
Uh, not the same scenario, Willie. Beltran was up with two outs. The pinch-hitter (Floyd) came up with none out. Clearly you understand the difference, right?
"I don't second-guess all that stuff, man. If you subscribe to that, then we would have had the same situation. If you believe we would have bunted and Jose Reyes would have hit that ball to center field. If you look at it that way and that's the way most people look at it. It would have been two outs, [Paul] Lo Duca would have walked. Same scenario is set up.
"That's the way I look at it because no one knows. I don't believe in that situation in giving up an out. One run down? A tie game? Yeah, I probably do [bunt] then. But not with two runs down and you've got momentum going. I didn't send Cliff to hit a three-run homer.
I was hoping he'd drive the ball into the gap. He's an excellent doubles hitter, one of the few guys on my team who doesn't hit into double plays. He's a fly ball guy. I'm not thinking he's going to hit a grandiose home run. He's going to drive the ball. We're going to keep the momentum going. We're going to score a couple of runs.
"You can look back -- and I don't -- and think about what you could have done, should have done. But the bottom line is that thing played out the way we wanted it to. And maybe even better because we had our best hitter, a Cardinal killer, at the plate; with one hit we're going to the World Series.
"Wouldn't change a thing. Second-guess whether I would have bunted or not. Who knows?
I might have put Anderson Hernandez up there and in front of 50,000 people, the 20-year-old kid could have [not gotten it done]. He might have popped that ball off ... or tried to bunt against a guy with a hellacious curveball and a 95 mph fastball and gotten to a point where he had to swing with two strikes on him and he hit into a double play or whatever. ... Say Glavine gets a bunt down. There's no guarantee. It's not always easy to lay a bunt down, especially when all the money's on the table like that. ... I thought about it. I thought about it way before it came up. But I still felt like with two runs to come across I needed to keep our momentum going.
"It would have been [an] easy call for [a] bunt. Outside of that, I didn't want to give up an out in that situation. In hindsight, it turned out even better, perfectly, for us. Best hitter. This guy killed the Cardinals all series. He threw a nasty curveball and Beltran got locked up. I'd like him to have taken a swing there.
But the guy has a great curveball. He made a great pitch. I know that's part of it, people want to second guess that. But I feel real good about the decisions I made."
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