Oct. 29 Joe Maddon postgame interview

THE MODERATOR: Questions for Joe Maddon.Q. Joe, Kris Bryant’s throwing errors, in either of those was he trying to force it or do too much? And on Montgomery going to second for the double play instead of getting the force at third, was that, again, a little aggressive?

JOE MADDON: The thing with KB, that ball, first when he did the pirouette, it’s just a play maybe to take a little more time with. The other ball should not have been thrown at all, that’s all. The slow roller, probably processed the pitcher’s running, so he said give it a go. That’s what I saw of the whole thing. But the first play, I think he had a shot had he slowed it down just a little bit, and found the first baseman. But he’s made so many good plays all year. That just happened tonight but that’s what I saw. Montgomery, again, you rarely ever teach somebody to go to third base. You just don’t do that. In his mind, there probably was, like everything being perfectly done, a possible chance, but I can’t fault him on that. You are just trained to do that. You rarely think about just throwing to third base to get one out. That’s probably the industry’s fault with all of that. So we made mistakes. Absolutely, we made mistakes tonight. That was part of it. But then again, we just have to do more offensively to give ourselves a chance. You’re going to make mistakes on occasion. You have to be able to play through the tough moments by doing something offensively, and we haven’t been able to do that.Q. Looking forward to tomorrow, do you take any comfort at all out of the fact that Miller has been used two days in a row now, and you did get to him and score a run off him tonight?

JOE MADDON: Although Shaw and Allen were not, so it’s hard to get a lot of solace from that thought. No, it’s good that he did. I was checking that out while he was out there. He went 46 a couple days ago, 17 yesterday, and I think almost 30 today, and still had great stuff. Dexter just worked a really, really good at-bat right there. So they’re still firm down there. We’ve just got to grab a lead. We’ve got to grab a lead in the latter part of the game and avoid those guys with either being tied or them having a lead. That’s what we have to do. And again, that just speaks — we scored first; I kind of liked it. That’s kind of a good thing normally, but we just did not add on. I thought we had better at-bats against Kluber tonight than we did a couple nights ago, but the hits just weren’t there. Although, they hit some homers tonight. We hit some balls good enough for homers tonight, but the wind was blowing in. We just didn’t pick the proper night to do that with.Q. Joe, Lackey pretty visibly was not happy with some of the calls at home plate. Did you feel like he was being squeezed?

JOE MADDON: No, I mean, that’s kind of normal behavior out of John, so it’s hard to tell. I didn’t get a chance to view it from in front or behind, so I don’t know. I had a nice talk with Marvin. You know, the thing that we try to teach our guys is that we’re good enough that even if an umpire misses a pitch, we could work through that. I’d like to believe from a hitter’s perspective and also from our pitcher’s perspective, you have to anticipate a call’s not going to go your way. It happens to everybody. It happens to both sides every night, so you can’t necessarily go there mentally. You’ve just got to keep moving through the moment. So, no, I really don’t …

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