pdo ?

ok - new to using pdo functions, but I thought I had a handle on it. I'm writing out to my page an input tag with the following value in it: 49'ers I can confirm it by using my browser's "view source" to see that is exactly how it exists in the page. When I hit a submit button and my script retrieves the 'post' vars my debugging steps are showing that the var $_POST['team'] contains the above value with a backslash (\) already inserted. This is causing me a problem when I then try to use pdo->quote to safely encode it for updating my sql database. My question is - why does the POST var show the \ char before I execute the 'quote' function?