Here are a selection of Joe Torre’s pre-game comments to the media.  These are out a bit late as I lent my recorder to T.J. Simers so that he could make sure he had his quotes from his banter with Torre correct.

On Rafael Furcal:

“Evidently last night when he made an awkward catch…he felt something in his back.  So he’s getting an MRI.  Hopefully the fact that it just happened and he felt it on that play, hopefully that indicates it’s something that’s not related [to previous back injuries], but we’re not going to know that until we get the results back.”

On Jeff Weaver’s left knee bothering him:

“I don’t necessarily need guys to tell me about all their aches and pains, but I think when it comes time to start to affect your performance, then you want to know.  A guy like Weav, who’s been around a little bit, sort of knows his body and thinks he can do things in spite of stuff.”

On Ramon Troncoso’s rehab in Albuquerque:

It’s ok. Ok. Inconsistent.  We’ll see. He gives us a guy who can throw a couple innings.  Maybe back here he can find that thing that he had earlier this year and last year too.”

On yesterday’s base running blunder in light of the team’s recent performance:

“It’s terrible.  It’s certainly something we always pay a lot of attention to in the Spring when we’re talking about base running drills.  A lot of it, on base running, a lot of it’s just common sense.  In Matt’s case, did he have to run full bore to get home? No, because he wasn’t going to throw him out.  But in light of James trying to go to third, which he shouldn’t do with two out, unless it’s just standing up, you just can’t take anything for granted.  In James’ case, once he made the commitment, and I talked to him a couple times during the game last night, he said ‘I made up my mind too soon.’  I said, that being the case, once you round the bag, you’ve got to see where the guy in front of you is.  You’re the one now, that can make sure he scores.  Even if you’re going to get tagged out, you’ve got to make sure it’s not until after he crossed the plate.  But he never looked.”

On Carlos Monasterios and the bullpen:

“He is the long guy.  Troncoso, I think he’ll probably take on a little more of a longer role.  With the addition of Dotel, I think we have some options for guys to get out of innings.”

On Manny Ramirez:

“Stan [Conte] went to Arizona to watch him work today, and Stan thinks it will be at least another week or so…before we make any plans for him to do some game stuff.  We had expected to see him this week, figuring he’s start to play in rehab, but that’s not the case.”

On what the team needs to do to turn things around:

“We just need to win a game to start building.  We know what we want to have happen.  We want what’s happened since the All-Star break to disappear, but that’s not going to happen.  We’re going to have to start stopping the negative by turning it into a positive, but you can only do that by winning a game and just building on that.  I just want us to play a clean game, be aggressive and pitch the way we’ve been pitching most of the time.  But we need to win a game.”

“It’s immaterial how far out we are, because it’s a matter of our winning games…we need to win.  Until we do that, I really don’t pay attention to the standings.”

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The media session concluded with the aforementioned banter between Torre and The Los Angeles Times’  T.J. Simers.  I’ll leave this for T.J.’s column, but needless to say, Torre knows Simers approach and had fun with him (for the most part).