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 >>

bleedCrimson.net: Ben Harty was named the WAC Hitter of the Week this week and he's maybe the one guy on the team that has improved the most from last season as far as offense.
Rocky Ward: Yeah, he is the most consistent offensive guy. We kinda felt like he might have deserved Hitter of the Week last week but it's kind of hard to do that when you don't win the series. The last couple of weeks he's been absolutely on fire and he had the game winning home run in the game we did win last weekend. What's been great about Ben is he's made the transition from first base to catch and he's actually become a better hitter. It's actually helped him. Tracking and seeing the ball as many times as you do as a catcher helps your vision, especially when you're playing on the road when you hit. The problem is most times it's countered by you being worn out by the physical job you have to do as a catcher. Ben is a big kid and it doesn't seem to bother him as much.

He had inconsistencies last year, he was fabulous at times. This year he's been nothing but great. Even when he's had a couple bat at bats here and there but he's countered them with good ones. He hasn't had any long droughts. I guess you know when a hitter has arrived when he's gone out and gone 0 for his last 8, which I know he's done some time during the season, and you don't notice it because every at bat is quality. He fouls some pitches off, guys really have to make good pitches to get him out. He's had a really good year and he's really been a key guy.   Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the games over the past week?
Rocky Ward: The last seven games have been beyond belief. We have been the best offensive team in the country and the worst pitching team. All in seven days. We went 2-3 but if you go all the way back to the last eight games it's just been insane with the number of runs given up. I coached my very first year here, we broke the NCAA record for most number of runs given up by a pitching staff which now thank goodness Air Force holds those records but we had like six of them. Most runs, most earned runs, most walks, most hits batsmen, most hit batsmen in a game... it was crazy. We were short players and having to send guys out there all the time on short rest just to have enough innings pitched. Even that team, we haven't come close to what's happened to us with these numbers.

bc.net: Last week you went on the road to New Mexico and split a pair of games winning the first 14-10 and then lost the second 14-3 and you were able to get a split in this series this year with them being a good team again this year.
RW: Both of us, eventually we'll get tired of it because we've been splitting. Before Ray [Birmingham] got there we had kind of controlled the series for a couple years. The long history, when you bring up the history of the series New Mexico leads by 40 or 50 wins, but in my time I was kind of ahead of the game until three years ago we lost three of four to them then last year we split with them and this year we split with them. Part of the problem we have is that we have to play them midweek and a lot of how good you can be midweek has a lot to do with how much pitching you used in the weekend games. When it was all said and done we kind of ended up lining each other up a little bit where both of us had pitching advantages. But the crazy thing is when we both thought we had pitching advantages, our game with Simon and their game with Armijo, the other guy won. You learn to kind of throw those things out when you have rivalry series. It was good baseball. I really like the way the series has turned out. I think that the way that both programs are run, we're both looking at bigger and better at the end of the year. There's a lot of intensity in it but I think there's a lot of shared respect too. I think it's good, it's a healthy rivalry. I think we continued that.   Continue Reading This Post >>

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 >>