bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the UNM series. You split the two games losing 9-6 and then winning 17-8. I thought the key series in the first game, even though you lost, was Scott Coffman coming in with bases loaded and nobody out and retiring three straight batters to keep you in the game at that point at 8-4.
Rocky Ward: The same thing happened in both games, the first and the last of the week, D.J. Simon was our man a year ago. He was the guy that beat Fresno to open the conference tournament, he was the guy we asked to go on two days rest to try to beat them and pitched his butt off in the finals and all of the sudden he's really struggled. UNM kind of got after him. Baseball has a lot of variance in it, some people call it luck. He's pitched into some poor luck. He's had a couple mechanical problems that he's worked with and we got behind early and New Mexico is a good baseball team. They were hot coming off of opening the season, at the time they played us they were 5-2. Scott Coffman came in and neutralized the game for us and gave us a chance. What we had missed the previous week, in particular in Arizona and maybe even in the Akron first game, we came from behind but we couldn't get over the top. We had a real chance to win that game against New Mexico. You give them some credit for closing us out but you also take some responsibility for not hitting with runners in scoring position and for not taking advantage.   Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on win number 301 and becoming New Mexico State's winningest coach?
Rocky Ward: I've thought about it a lot. We started looking at the possibility at the end of the year last year in the conference tournament. If we'd won and moved on we might have gotten it in a Regional and that would have been pretty cool. But that didn't work out. It's good to get it at home and the more you reflect back on it you start thinking about a lot of different games. The 13 runs we scored in the bottom of the ninth to beat No. 1 Texas Tech late in the year in my first season and games like that. A couple of my players based on the 300 win deal sent me messages reminding me that they had a few of those. It kind of makes you reflect back a little bit on all the guys and where we started and all the accomplishments we've succeeded at. But also the difficulties along the way and so it's important to me on a personal basis. I think it's important to the people closest to me and I think that's what you find out about it. They're happy for me. So now the weird thing about breaking one of these is it's broken and now just keep adding to it and hopefully you'll have the opportunity to make it a big number when it's all said and done.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on Dan Reid being named the WAC Pitcher of the Week?
Rocky Ward: It's cool that we've grown to the stage where we're good enough in the pitching staff to be given consideration. That was the good thing about the weekend. There were a lot of good things in a weekend that kind of answered some concerns we had. The one area we didn't have concerns with didn't perform at all and that's the offensive side. Dan was outstanding, he was great. You put that six innings of one run, none earned, struck out seven, walked one and gave up five hits, you're going to win 98 percent of the time with our offense. We just didn't give him any support. We're really pleased with that. I really had thought that he was gonna be that type of guy, I thought he had that type of skill.

The guy that was really the pleasant surprise was Thomas Brendel because he'd been kind of good and then not good, kind of inconsistent but then when the game came, the best side of him came out. Pitching this weekend all the way around, the only real hiccup we had was when [Jared] Jordan came off the four hour delay and gave up five runs in the bottom of the sixth against Gonzaga but we probably made a mistake because we moved him up a day. We talked about going with either Reid or Jordan because those were the third game and fourth game pitchers and when the rain came we knew the fourth game was gone. Jordan was probably more prepared for that [fourth] spot, he just didn't have very good stuff. That was the only hiccup but that's not something we're concerned with. We put him in a day early and his arm just wasn't quite where it needed to be and he didn't have real good stuff.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on Tyler Sturdevant and Jeff Farnham being drafted in the 27th round?
Rocky Ward:I'm glad they're getting opportunities. They're both a little maybe disappointed at the round but they still both went in the second day and there's some value in there. I talked to Jeff and they'll send him down to Tampa for the workouts and I think he'll be assigned out to the Penn League in Oneida, NY. That's a very very good league. He'll get a pretty good indoctrination into pro ball pretty quick. He's excited and that's all that's important.  Continue Reading This Post >>

In this week's interview we talk with Coach Ward about Bryan Marquez's NCBWA District Player of the Year award, Jeff Farnham and Byran Marquez's All-PING! honors and the Major League draft.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on Bryan Marquez earning NCBWA District Player of the Year.
Rocky Ward: The unique thing about it is that he's a Player of the Year now as far as the District and we're not just talking about at shortstop. That's pretty cool. The writers believe that Bryan Marquez is the best player in this region of the country and we've kind of always felt that this just kind of makes it official. The thing that I'm excited about is that really increases his chances to be an All-American shortstop when that's released in the next week or so. What it reminds me of is the old days before the BCS is where you're waiting for the final coaches poll and the final media poll where you're waiting to find out who's the national champion. It's the same type of deal. There's multiple polls out there and the more people out there that think you are, the more it legitimizes you as the very very best. I think that's pretty cool stuff.  Continue Reading This Post >>

In the final part of this week's interview with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward, we talked to Coach Ward about his team's record in close games and his team's margin of victory when holding the opponents to under five runs.

bc.net: A couple other interesting statistics about the club, your team was 18-9 in the games that were decided by three runs or fewer.
RW: The funny part about it is that the nine bothered us. That's a hell of a record in that situation, it really is. But the way we lost some of those nine kind of kept us from making that step that we really wanted to and thought that we had the talent to. We keep going back to scoring a bunch of runs in the eighth against both Reno and Fresno and not being able to close them. Even at the same time going into the conference tournament what I thought was a big advantage, I thought we were the only team in the league that had done a nice job of closing games. That was really the problem the league had as a whole. Nobody really had, except for us, a dominant closer. Now we don't get a closer on the All-Conference list. Why? Because we had three of them. You have three of them with enough numbers to win in [Jake] Wilson, [Scott] Coffman and [Justin] Cooper and then the guy that had four saves last season in [Erik] Nyquist that couldn't really win All-Conference because his ERA was so high. I believe what ended up happening is we split our own votes. I thought we had the best closing corps, setup and close guys in the league. I think that went a long ways. At the same time we still had some failures in those nine games. I think of the nine that we did lose, I think five are games that we should have won. We just should have won. We made a mistake defensively or we made a mistake on the mound or we let somebody back in it that shouldn't have been able to. We gave up some momentum, we didn't score late.   Continue Reading This Post >>

In part two of this week's interview with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward, we talked to Coach Ward about Bryan Marquez earning First Team All-American honors and talked about several of the significant wins during the season.

bc.net: After we talked last week Bryan Marquez was named Louisville Slugger First Team All-American becoming just the fifth Aggie and fourth under yours and your dad time here to earn First Team All-American honors.
RW: It's neat stuff. That says that a lot of people thought that he was the best shortstop in the country and we think he was. It's a great honor for the university those are things that transcend win and loss records. Part of our responsibility as coaches is to develop student athletes and these types of awards go a long long ways not just in what a kid does athletically. Will help him in the draft? You bet it will. It should help him with some exposure from the pro scouts who'll say if he's not on our radar, he needs to be now. At the same time it's something that you carry throughout your life. Most of us strive throughout our lives to do something special, something somebody else hasn't ever done. It's something that Bryan will always have and it'll be something in his day to day life that'll give him confidence that he might not have had otherwise. It's a great honor. It's awesome. I take great pride in that I was able to coach him and me and my staff might have had a little to do with his progress and those are all neat things.   Continue Reading This Post >>

In part one of this week's interview with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward, we talked to Coach Ward about the way the 2010 schedule is shaping up, his thoughts on the epic 25 inning classic between Texas and Boston College in the NCAA Regional in Austin as well as his thoughts on the WAC expanding past seven teams in baseball.

bleedCrimson.net: How is next year's schedule shaping up?
Rocky Ward: Right now the NCAA changed their 13 week rule back to 14 weeks and so everybody's in a scramble to fill that first weekend. We had St. John's in there as of two days ago but then they bailed on us and that would have been a nice eastern team to play. They've had pretty good success. I'm not sure. I think we've got Wofford, they're out of the east and I think they may fill that spot. Early in the year Akron comes in, St. Joseph's comes in. These are all northeastern type clubs. We're going to play a home and home with Houston Baptist, that's a friends from last year deal where they just came here. Then we'll play Cal, we've got another long road trip between conference games where we play San Jose and Sacramento and so in between those two series we'll go down and play Cal. That'll be interesting, they're Tuesday/Wednesday games. At the end of the year we go to Hawai'i again to end the conference schedule. Our bye weekend is the last weekend and I just can't find anybody to fill that. Right now we're coming off of Hawai'i and back to the mainland and playing a couple games against Cal State-Bakersfield. It's a little stronger schedule than it was a year ago. We'll have Fresno State at home. We'll have Nevada at home and then we'll have La. Tech at home. It's rotation for a little easier travel even though we have the Hawai'i trip. But Sacramento and San Jose are pretty easy to get into. You can fly in, not necessarily direct but you can fly in and the drive isn't too difficult. So overall it's a good solid schedule. We're in talks again with Texas Tech trying. They were looking to play a single game at a neutral site in Midland, TX which is I think where the Rock Hounds are (the AA affiliate of the Oakland A's). We played there about four or five years ago in a tournament. It's a nice facility and the people there did a nice job. It's just about 60 miles south of Lubbock. They're trying to see if they can find a couple games, I'd like after a several year hiatus for us to go play there and them to come here in Las Cruces. We're trying to get that done.   Continue Reading This Post >>

In part two of this week's interview Coach Ward talks about some of his kids coming back for next season, the team's pitching and the outgoing seniors and what they meant to the program.

bc.net: How are things shaping up for next season?
RW: You start thinking now to the positive side of your returning kids and what you're doing with your recruiting class. We're going to be pretty young on the mound next year after being very experienced this year. Even with the amount of time that some of the young kids got. With the amount of pressure innings that Coffman pitched, that Cooper pitched and the successes they had. That'll be of great benefit to them a year from now. You look at what Jordan and Simon did as returning guys, we think we'll probably get both of those guys back. Even though I think Simon could possibly, if somebody liked him enough with the numbers he put up, could get drafted and we could lose him. That's a pretty good core of people that are coming back. We're going to have to add some stuff to it. Cooper could move into a starting role pretty easily and right now we could have the top three guys ready to go. We're going to have to add a couple guys out of the bullpen. We'll have to add another starter with the recruiting class. That'll be something that early in the year will probably be a weakness. Then obviously we have most of our corner people back. Most of our up the middle is gone. We'll have to see what Mike Sodders does with his knee and whether or not he'll be able to return to the middle of the infield or not. You just don't know with that type of injury to the knee. Both him and Aguirre will have knee surgeries in the offseason and we expect both of them to recover fully. We have Chris Auten who is now healthy, feels good. His back's healthy and he's gonna play some summer baseball. He'll be back. So we have some really good quality guys back.   Continue Reading This Post >>

Coach Ward talks about the final two games against Fresno State, his team not earning an at-large bid, the strength of the WAC and the records the team broke in the 2009 season.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the final two games. Your team played flawless defensive baseball committing no errors. D.J. Simon gave you seven strong innings in game two giving up just three runs.
Rocky Ward: Yeah. I thought we played really good clean baseball. Obviously there were a couple opportunities when we didn't score runs when we had a chance. Fresno didn't play very clean. They committed some errors that gave us opportunities but what they did do is they made quality plays after the errors. One of the situations where [Danny] Muno had a double play ball and threw it past the shortstop and [Tom] Mendonca made a great play diving into the hole keeping it from going into foul territory. If he hadn't made that play we'd have scored a couple and maybe everybody on the bases because the left fielder wasn't in position to back up where he should have been. It's frustrating from that standpoint, we had some opportunities but they ponied up and played great baseball as well, even with the mistakes they made. They resettled, refocused and played great baseball. They got real good performances from their kids on the mound. [Holden] Sprague came in in relief and gets the win in game one. His ERA against us had to be somewhere around 12.00 but what he did is he changed his approach. He's more of a multiple breaking ball guy, kind of a Jared Jordan type pitcher and he went at us with the fastball and so he changed his approach to us and it worked.   Continue Reading This Post >>