Ned Yost media session: August 2

The media met with manager Ned Yost before tonight’s game against the Cleveland Indians. Jeff Francoeur has not been on the field for the last four games including tonight’s contest. Yost did mention that he will be playing tomorrow as the Rangers will start lefty Matt Harrison. “It (the time off) gives you some time in the cage to work on some areas that you need to work on. Plus is kind of cleanses your mind a little bit, take a step back and relax a little bit if you allow yourself to do it,” said Yost. He then followed with, “The thing about this game is in order to be successful you’ve got to be productive and if production is not there then it could become a platoon situation. I don’t think that we are there yet, but he’s a guy that we counted on a lot for production this year. I think this little bit of a break is going to help him get back to where he is; it is not been from the lack of trying. The bottom line is for all of us are that we step on the field and that we produce. Production and winning ball games are all that matter up here.”

Chris Getz has started over the last three games and has done a good job over those games. “He is a guy that will hit somewhere between .280 and .300, it’s not going to be a hard .300, but a very solid situational guy. A guy that can bunt, hit and run, move runners and play very solid defense. He is a guy that fits in our lineup as long as we’ve got our run producers producing and that’s important. He’s not going to be a guy that is going to produce a lot of RBI, he might score a lot of runs, but he won’t probably produce a lot of runs. His value comes from his base running and his defense at second base,” said Yost. Tomorrow will probably be his day off and Yuniesky Betancourt will be filling in for his position. Yost said, “Yuni has been, even though he hasn’t hit for an extremely high average, he is one of our consistent producers in terms of RBI and we are looking for runs right now. So we will try to take advantage of that, but Getzy has done a nice job every time he has been out