How excited are you to be in this position?

DAISUKE MATSUZAKA: "After the last few games I believed I was going to have a chance to throw again. My teammates kept insisting I would have another chance. So I'm going into tomorrow very excited."

Can you equate this to anything else - the WBC finale - or the high school tournament you starred in 1998?

DAISUKE MATSUZAKA: "I can't make a simple comparison to those other games, but I just hope that I can pitch the same way as I did in those other opportunities."

Curt Schilling spoke to you for some time in Cleveland about fastball command and some of the tips he uses to throw strikes with his fastball. How helpful was that to you?

DAISUKE MATSUZAKA: "It's nothing very complicated. It's really very simple what we talked about. I just need to apply that in a simple way to my pitching."

You seemed very upset after the last game, were you upset at yourself, the results or both?

DAISUKE MATSUZAKA: "Whether or not we had won or lost, immediately following the game is a very important time period for me, although I might have appeared very upset, I wasn't as upset as everybody thought.".

Courtesy of FastScripts by ASAP Sports.