Jim Bowden Four Quotations

He'll be somewhere after Hernandez and Patterson. Whether it will be three, four or five, we'll have to see. He had a rough year, but in the second half he pitched pretty well. This guy's history is that he makes a lot of starts and throws a lot of innings.

We haven't replaced Pedro. We don't need to. So we'll go with the four starters we have and add the extra guy to the bullpen. We'll add the fifth starter when we need to.

We seem to be coming together as a team. We got off to a rough start, our schedule was a little difficult. But to win four out of six on that trip was important, coming together of this club.

Brian is one of the best defensive catchers in baseball and we're glad to be able to keep him in Washington for at least the next four years. It is the goal of any organization to sign, develop and then retain their own homegrown players, and this is what we've accomplished with Brian's contract.

We are very pleased to add a dependable starter such as Brian Lawrence to our rotation. No only does he have a reputation of going deep into games, but he has averaged 34 starts the last four seasons.

After studying his four years on the job, I came to the conclusion that Dana is one of the brightest young evaluators in the game,

As far as the pool of players in our farm system, although it's improved, we have a long way to go and you don't redo a farm system overnight. You have to do it one draft at a time. So it takes four to five years to get it back to where you wanted to get it.

It just a matter of making sure that his arm is OK. If he plays four or five days, having no pain, can play back to back and making the throws hard, we will move him to New Orleans, so long as the weather is warm enough.

There's a risk when you make deals. When I made the Ken Griffey Jr. trade in Cincinnati everybody said, 'This is one of the best trades in baseball. Congratulations.' Then he was hurt for four years and it was a horrible trade. That's part of the game. Obviously, if we knew this trade was going to play out this way, we wouldn't have done it.