bleedCrimson.net: Was this freshman class with Parker Hipp, Zach Fisher, Tyler Mack and Ryan Beck the best performing freshmen classes as a group that you've had?
Rocky Ward: Yeah. Clearly. We've had a couple years where we've had a freshman or two who've really played great. Hipp and Fisher were gonna play a lot of baseball but they got moved into an every day role in a lot of cases because of the injuries to Harty and Sodders and Beck and Mack moved themselves into weekend starting roles in league and really handled it well. It's probably the best group of freshman performances we've ever had. I don't know what'll happen but I think Parker Hipp and Zack Fisher are deserving of Freshman All-American honors. I would think that Ryan Beck would but his earned run average won't be good enough. He had three or four innings where he gave up big runs. Earned run average is exactly that, it's an average. There were just a couple times where he bobbled. Eighty percent of the time he was on the mound he was outstanding, the other twenty percent he was bad and it kind of hurt his overall average. But that's part of making the transition from high school baseball to Division I, top 100 baseball which is where we play. It's a pretty high level of baseball.

bc.net: Tyler Mack finished with six wins and the freshman record at New Mexico State is 10 wins. How impressive is the season that he had?
RW: Yeah, wins by a freshman is 10 by Gary Goldsmith. He's all over the record book. He played in 1990 and when you look at our stat book, games started in a season, 19, career 64, Gary Goldsmith. Innings pitched in a season, career innings pitched, he's the career strikeout leader. For Tyler Mack to win six is a big deal. Ten for a freshman is quite a year, 10 for anybody. I just went through the All-American list and I believe there are only eight guys on the All-American list in our region that had double-digits in wins. It's hard to do. It's hard to win double-digits in college. You only get 14 to 16 starts and so you've got to be pretty good. Ryan Beck tied the record for most appearances by a freshman with 26 and that happened to be held by Scott Coffman last year so we have back-to-back freshmen make a lot of appearances for us.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the season overall? A number that will get overlooked at least immediately because of the way the season ended was the fact that the 2010 team won 36 games which is the 5th most in program history.
Rocky Ward: Yeah. The one thing that was so unique about this season was it was really broken down into three parts. The first 21 games we were 10-11, below .500. We were struggling finding an identity. We gave up 30 runs twice in that stretch. That's hard to do. For a team as good as we were to give up 30 runs twice. We did it once against Georgia State who ended up leading the nation in runs scored per game. For all intents and purposes one of the best offenses in the country. But the other one was St. Joseph's who had a pretty good offense but I don't think they ended up in the top 20 [runs scored] I believe. Just the essence of that part of the season was we win a game 33-1, which was the biggest winning margin of the season against St. Joseph's but then turn around and lose a game 35-16, to the same team. That was the essence of where we were in that first part of the season. We're going, "Are we gonna be good or are we not?" We were really good or really bad and then all of the sudden, a couple things happened. We made some changes coaching-wise to try to shore up our defense, go to Santa Barbara and lose a game against a very good pitcher, one of the better pitchers in the Big West, then go on to win 12 in a row.

At one point we won 24 of 27 and one of them was the tie. So in the middle of the season we were the hottest team in the country and that's where our ranking came in and that's where we established ourself at the top of the league. We led the league a couple different times through the season. Then you lose 12-of-13 to finish. So the 12 game winning streak you kind of gave back with the stuff at the end.

In analysis of it all, the amazing part of the 24 of 27 was the fact that we lost Ben Harty after the Santa Barbara series. He was our four-hole hitter and at the time was hitting over .400 with 12 home runs and our number one catcher. To go through that stretch and then a couple weeks later we lose Mike Sodders who had 15 home runs and was hitting .370 or .380 and to have been able to handle losing your top two offensive players and to be able to put that stretch together is what made us feel like as coaches, players and fans that this was a pretty special team. To be able to overcome those types of losses. It was a pretty special team. This was a group of really good hard-working kids. The years that Wesley Starkes, Chace Perkins, Ryan Aguayo, Parker Hipp and Nate Shaver, those guys in particular, had. They were the heart and soul of the team. They took it upon themselves to kind of replace Sodders' and Harty's numbers. That's basically what they did. I leave Leo [Aguirre] out of that because he one of the top three hitters and he was the only one left. He basically continued to do what he did. What the other guys bring up their games, it's hard to say they were playing over their heads, but they really played up when the pressure was on. That's what put us through that run.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on Hohokam Field after seeing it for a couple games yesterday.
Rocky Ward: This is the place that's got the big green batter's eye, I don't know what the height is but it's probably 100 foot wall in dead center, it's almost impossible to hit it out to dead center. But it's also 420 there too. It's 340 down the left field line and 350 down the right field line. Those are reasonable sizes, similar to what ours is. But it goes straight across and then cuts right out at the gaps and kind of turns the corner. There's a little about a 20 foot jet back to 390 and then 390 up to 420 in center. Anything that's pulled from straightaway left field and straightaway right field to the line the ball really carries well. We had six or eight home runs in batting practice that were hit over the 390 markers. That was one part I wasn't sure how well the ball would carry. It's one of those deals where if you hit it 10 feet to the right it might be a fly out and 10 feet to the left it's a home run by 20 feet. It's a pretty unique ballpark, it seems to be pretty fair.

The field is in good shape, it's playing very very fast but there are no lips on it. It's what you'd expect from a Major League field. The grounds crew does a real good job but it's still a desert infield. In watching both games yesterday there were probably four or five basehits on balls hit off the front part of the plate, the hardpan in front, that jumped up in the air. Most of them didn't go out of the infield but if the runner was a decent runner, he got a basehit out of it. There was a key basehit in the SJSU game where a ball bounced over Kort's head at first that was the fourth run after they'd scored three in the fifth that kind of got things going.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the series against Fresno State?
Rocky Ward: Unfortunately the series went by the way of tradition. Every time in the last five years that Fresno has needed to pick it up and play, they've done it. They did it last year when they kind of put themselves in a real bad spot by putting themselves in last place going into Sacramento and they went in to Sacramento and went from last to third in one weekend. It was very much a playoff atmosphere, good crowds. Both teams played very nervous the first couple innings of the first game and then they hit us in the mouth with a five-spot, we made a defensive mistake that kind of opened the door and then they just kind of settled in and started playing baseball and we couldn't get the momentum stopped. They put up another six-spot and all of the sudden that game is sort of out of hand even though my offense kept making moves at them. It was kind of one of those games that the team that got the advantage and got relaxed in the series first was going to do well and they did. They were able to carry that momentum into games two and three. We really played… game one we played tight and when they got going we couldn't stop them. Game two and three we really played bad. We played poorly. My middle infield had their worst series of the year, they both looked like they were worn out and tired. We just couldn't quite get our feet underneath us. We came back Sunday and played really quality baseball. We didn't make mistakes, played very well. The difference in the game is they made about five big-time defensive plays. The center fielder made three dives in the outfield and made all three in key situations. The shortstop made two or three plus plays. They played the whole weekend on a very hard field. One of the problems we have here late in the year is it gets so dry and especially when we go on the road trip and come back off the road, our field gets really hard and gets really fast. It plays lightening fast. They made one error on the weekend. For a team that was an okay defensive team just like us. Their defensive numbers are almost identical to ours. They just played lights out.

It's disappointing, it's an opportunity lost. You feel like at one point that all the work you've done to this point has been wasted, that's kind of what you feel after you go through one of these things. But they're very good. There's no question right now after seeing most of the league, I haven't seen Hawai'i, but I feel very strongly that we're the two best teams in the league. We're still in first by a half game. The problem is we've got four left and they've got eight left. They've got eight at home and we've got four on the road. The unique thing is about it is Fresno has not been a good home team. Their home record is 13-14. Their road record coming in here was 11-6 and now they're up to 15-6. They're in the top 10 in the country as far as road records as we are.   Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the series sweep against Louisiana Tech?
Rocky Ward: We didn't start out very well. We started out down 8-3 in the first game and found a way to score late and get another great middle/late relief, in this case from D.J. Simon. He kept them there outside of a two-run home late which was meaningless to hold for an 11-10 win. That was kind of the tough game.

La. Tech's really got a great offense. To be honest, La. Tech's offense was better than ours. Now I think ours at full strength is better than theirs. They were pretty dangerous. We gave up our share of runs this weekend but I really thought our pitching staff did a real quality job against a bunch of bombers. They've got a murderer's row of guys. Threlkeld is a really good athlete, he's got oppo pop, he fits our yard really well. Davon Dageford is really a good bad slider hitter. The only way you can get him out is throwing him the breaking ball but if you throw him the breaking ball and you hang it up a little bit he hits it out. If you don't get it right you're in trouble. Finally we said forget it and started throwing him fastballs in and he kept pelting them to left for singles. That was fine with us. When we got done with the series, at the end of every series you do the nominations for WAC Player of the Week and so you go look at your stats and kind of choose who it should be. We had a bunch of guys with good numbers, Leo won it and obviously deserved it but Dageford's numbers weren't much different from his.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the series with Sacramento State?
Rocky Ward: Overall we had great pitching, played solid defense. We didn't play terribly well offensively. We had key basehits, we pretty much got a hit every time we had to have one. Not that we didn't leave our share of guys on base, but we just didn't annihilate the ball like we had been doing. Their pitching staff was okay and they played pretty good defense.

We had some guys that had just backed off of pretty hot runs in Aguayo, Perkins, Shaver and Aguirre had just been on fire for weeks and they kind of all backed up a little bit to normalcy but they each still had key basehits when they were needed. It was kind of one of those weekends where we pitched really well. We played okay defense. We put a couple games in jeopardy because we didn't turn the double play and didn't make a play. Stuff that doesn't show up in the stat sheet, not necessarily errors. We're still a pretty unique ballclub in that we haven't made very many errors that have cost us. We've either played around them or they've come at a time where the game was already in hand.

It was a pretty fortunate weekend and you've got to have a pretty fortunate weekend to sweep anybody, it's hard to do. We got great starting pitching and for gosh sake, we got six or seven strong out of each of our starters and we were pretty much use Coffman and Anderson to setup and close the games and Heredia to bridge a couple games and Reyes to bridge a game. From a pitching standpoint we didn't get pressured too much. We got good starting pitching for the first time this year.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the series with San Jose State, your team picked up a couple of really good wins in the last two games .
Rocky Ward: Yeah. They lost a lot of guys but they're a little bit more like they used to be. They're a situational hitting team. They do a good job of bunting, hit and running, stolen base, moving runners. They're pretty efficient that way, they're very very aggressive and they swung the bat for a little bit of power this weekend. A little more than they're used to. They only had nine home runs coming in and they hit four. The offensive conditions were pretty good. The wind was blowing out a little bit the first three days.

They were okay. Their pitching isn't great, they've got one guy, the guy that beat us on Saturday is really pretty good. A good arm with a good deep breaking ball and a pretty good idea of the change. We did a really nice job against him but we just gave up too much too early to stay in it.

bc.net: Your starting pitching, aside from the Saturday game, was really outstanding and the entire series was really good for your staff but particularly for your starters who had had some trouble against Nevada.
RW: Yeah, we got a real nice outing from Coop. He wasn't great but he was pretty good. He kept us in the game and that's all we're asking for from our starters, to keep us in the game through five and our offense is going to do something pretty special in the last three innings if we're within range. We've done it pretty consistently throughout the season even when it doesn't look like we're in range. We feel like we have a better than average chance to win when we're within a run in the fifth. We pretty much did that consistently.

Cooper's outing was solid. Reid had a good outing, he gave up three home runs in an inning, which is probably the first time San Jose's done that in quite a while. They were all solo shots. He pitched well. T-Mack basically was dominant during his time on the mound. Of the four games it was a good day to pitch because the wind was blowing in at about 20mph. I don't think it would have made much of a difference in the way Tyler pitched. It affected us a little bit early in the game. We had a couple balls that were hit pretty hard that the wind hung up and turned into pretty routine plays.

Our starting pitching was good and again our bullpen has been really phenomenal and it's coming from a lot of different people. That was the real risk in moving Cooper to a starting role was changing the feel of the bullpen because he'd been a pretty key factor in there. Other guys stepped up and did a really nice job.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on Nate Shaver being selected the WAC Hitter of the Week? We talked about him last week as being a guy who had, in the previous two weeks, been overshadowed a little by a couple of his teammates' performances.
Rocky Ward: If you look at his numbers over the last couple weeks they're amazing. I went and looked back since the beginning of the streak which is record is now 13-1-1. In those games he's hitting .638. Better than Aguirre who was Hitter of the Week and better than Sodders who has been on a tear. It was kind of a tossup because him and Sodders were big time this weekend. What it came down to is he'd been so consistent over the past three weeks and we nominated him and he got it. Any time you have a player of the week, most of the time it means you've won the series on the weekend. Rarely do they award it to a team that lost and it means that you're performing to the levels that you expect.

It's good recognition for the program and it's good for the kid. We're dealing with college kids and we talk about resume building things. It's an honorable deal. When you're dealing with kids you hope that every kid you touch through your program can do something really special some time. Not all of them are All-Americans, not all of them can make All-Conference, not all of them can be Players of the Week but it adds another guy.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the 11 game winning streak which is the second longest in program history and also breaking into the Top 25 this week.
Rocky Ward: The biggest winning streak right now and I think we also have the longest road winning streak. One of the categories I really pay attention to is the road record and at 8-2 on the road, not counting neutral site games, that puts us in the Top 10 for road records and these are all important statistical categories. Particularly the road records, it may be more important than the winning streak. In all sports in order to win a conference championship you have to be a pretty good road team. We're going to play some of the better teams in the league on the road. It's a nice schedule, a nice mix. We've got Hawai'i who is the highest RPI team right now and has played a really tough schedule and put together a pretty good year and look to be one of the contenders for the league title and we've got them on the road this year.

Winning streaks are great, they're a lot better than losing streaks, and they do have a tendency to drive you. Streaks in any way, either hitting streaks or whatever, they kind of have a life of their own. It keeps you motivated. The winning streak was important to us going into Houston Baptist, those were what you would call on the schedule trap games where we'd just come off of playing and beating Texas Tech and going into a ball club that on paper we should handle. You never say in baseball "easily", you should win those games and that's the way the fan looks at it. The coach, we know better. Houston Baptist is a lot better than they were a year ago and we played really good quality baseball and we needed to in order to win all four. But I think the streak is what helps keeps us motivated to not come to the park one day without our full attention and not play very well.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your overall thoughts on the weekend and the four game sweep of Wofford?
Rocky Ward: We continued with the trend that started last week in Santa Barbara with making some changes. With the Santa Barbara series only being a three game set we weren't able to completely renovate what we were trying to do with the pitching staff but we were able to do that this weekend with a four game set. We pitched Simon on Friday and moved Reid off of game two into game three. When you get into league play and even in a four game set the second game of the doubleheader is a seven inning game and so you kind of like to put a guy in that that you think can throw a complete game there. We put Cooper as a starter [in game two], we had a choice between Cooper and Brendel and went with Cooper in the second spot and then brought [Tyler] Mack off of the start last Sunday into the fourth spot. Things worked out pretty well. Simon was really good in a terribly windy day. He walked seven but only gave up a few hits. That's kind of one of the problems with wind, not just the fact that the ball carries but also the fact that a pitcher's balance point is hard to maintain. The seven walks were probably caused by a 40 mph wind blowing on him the whole time. He did a nice job. Cooper had a really nice outing, the longest of his career. Reid was solid but he still had that one inning where he lost some focus. That's been his problem. If you take those three or four innings away from him he would have absolutely sparkling numbers but he has a tendency to get in trouble in an inning and not be able to get out of it. On Sunday Mack's outing was solid. He got hit in the mouth a little bit with the three spot in the fifth that brought them back into the game and some of the same problems we've been having most every Sunday kind of arose again. Once the opposing offense got momentum we really had a hard time stopping them for a few innings there but our offense was able to pick up the pace and maintain a cushion. Overall, it was a four game sweep. Wofford is a much better ball club than some of those teams in the last four or five years that we've swept. It was a pretty impressive weekend overall.  Continue Reading This Post >>