bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. This week we talked with Coach Ward about past two weekends of play in which the Aggies compiled an 8-1 record including a 5-0 road record. We also chatted about the upcoming conference opening series against Sacramento State as well as his thoughts on the team's ranking.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the past two weeks, you picked up a series victory over San Francisco winning three out of four games and then swept your five game road trip in Texas against UT-Brownsville and UT-Pan American.
Rocky Ward: We played pretty well in the San Francisco series. We kind of established the fact in that series that we can play from the front and from the back and that's good thing to get done. The two games at Brownsville were overmatches which we kind of expected but the people down there treated us with excitement and it was a fun thing for the kids to see that part of the country. We won the first one pretty big and then the second game [Justin] Cooper gets his first starts, walks a guy, hits a guy, gives up a three run home run and all of the sudden they jump on top. We struggled a little bit, didn't drive in runs, left some people on base but eventually won it going away a little bit. It's good and it's still good to have challenges.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. This week we talked with Coach Ward about the comeback victory over UNM, Bryan Marquez earning National Player of the Week, the Norther Colorado series and the upcoming series against San Francisco.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about Bryan Marquez and his week that earned him the Louisville Slugger National Player of the Week.
Rocky Ward: It's a neat deal. The neat thing about it is a lot of time on those things all they're able to go off of are the stats. Obviously his stats were good but they don't really go off of how important the hits were and obviously his were. He had a lot of opportunities to impact games in a positive way. We won four out of five and probably wouldn't have done that had it not been for him. He really had a good quality week for us.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. This week we talked with Coach Ward about the sweep of Hartford, the UNM game this past Tuesday, the rematch in Albuquerque, Bryan Marquez, Nate Shaver and Ben Harty.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the New Mexico game this past Tuesday. Aside from the outcome, I thought it was a good college baseball game.
Rocky Ward: Yeah, it was a good game. It was what coaches would consider in baseball as one of those regular baseball games where it could have gone either way. In this case New Mexico got a couple key base hits and we didn't. I think that the contest was competed pretty evenly. They just got the upper hand. The good part about the game was it's a big game in the state, they went on top 2-0 and we came back and Sodders hit the two run home run to tie it and get back into the game and get emotionally into the game. Really the difference in the game was in the bottom of the fourth we threatened to to score and didn't come through and in the top of the fifth they threatened to score and they did. That was really the difference is those two half innings in the game.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. This week we talked with Coach Ward about the sweep of Chicago State, the upcoming series against Hartford, the UNM game on Tuesday and Jeff Farnham earning WAC Player of the Week.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the weekend?
Rocky Ward: We just got the announcement that Farnham was the Player of the Week. Overall the weekend was solid because Vendette really pitched well again. What we really wanted to see was guys to replicate their performance from the previous week because those performances were all solid. We also wanted to get a couple new starters to the mound which we were able to do. Between Vendette and Daniel Simon, they were both outstanding. Simon was fabulous and guys kinda feel like he kind of deserved Player of the Week on the pitching side. But I think the kid Sam Spangler, a New Mexico kid playing in Hawai'i, I guess if we can give it to an in-state kid then I'll forgive them. Both the starts between Garza and Amundson, they were not stellar but they were solid. Garza was solid but Casey struggled but we got to find a little bit out about Corey Hill. Having to come in in the second inning with nobody out and looked to take over a game and get it stabilized and he did. He put a zero on the board and then we scored five to get the lead back. There were some good things that happened in that transaction that we're happy with.   Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward as the Aggies take aim at a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2003. This week we talked with Coach Ward about the opening weekend sweep of North Dakota, the upcoming series against Chicago State, the new WAC schedule as well as his thoughts on the WAC's performance on opening weekend.

bleedCrimson.net: You put on a pretty big offensive display in the opening weekend but maybe more importantly you had a good defensive showing.
Rocky Ward: Yeah, we're pleased with the quality of defense and pitching. We didn't know what to expect from North Dakota. They're coming out of cold weather, a new Division I program, making the transition. I was really pleased with their quality, I thought they had a good quality ball club. I understand people will look at the scores and say, "they pretty much took it to them." They made a couple mistakes in the first and third games that expanded the scores, those could have been much closer than they were. We really took it to them pretty well in game one of the doubleheader but overall all three starting performances were outstanding. I don't know that I can remember in school history that we had three consecutive six plus inning starts out of guys. You'd have to go back a ways. And we got good relief and played solid defense, only four errors on the weekend. A couple of those were kind of silly ones. Two of the four were first hitter of the game, just kind of routine plays to the first basemen and they weren't quite ready.

Middle infield and outfield play was really good. And really it wasn't a great offensive weekend outside of what Leo Aguirre did. Some guys had a good weekend, don't get me wrong, a few guys that we expect to be great offensive performers had below average weekends, to bad weekends. And to go and be able to average 14 [runs] with that said, what are we going to be like when we get it all together.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward. The Aggie baseball season begins February 20th and we've checked in with Coach Ward to get an update on the team as they ready for the 2009 season. The Aggies completed a successful fall practice season and we have Coach Ward's thoughts on his infielders, outfielders and pitching staff. Up next are the outfielders.

LF: We've moved [Leo] Aguirre from a 1B/DH role to left field. Leo's not a real good runner, but he's really really worked hard this fall. He's cut his 60-yard dash speed by about 4/10ths of a seconds which is practically unheard of. He's really worked hard, he played there a couple innings last year just to get him in the lineup because late in the year he was just hot. Almost a must have in the lineup guy. We project him going into the year to be the starting left fielder. He's not going to go take balls off the wall but he'll catch stuff that he gets to, he throws the ball accurately, breaks well. When you go back and look at his fall statistics he hit .468 with 11 doubles and six home runs, 32 RBIs in 94 at bats.

This is the best offensive fall team we've ever put together. Will it become the best offensive spring team in the school's history? It very well might.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net has been conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward. The Aggie baseball season begins February 20th and we've checked in with Coach Ward to get an update on the team as they ready for the 2009 season. The Aggies completed a successful fall practice season and we have Coach Ward's thoughts on his infielders, outfielders and pitching staff. Up first are the infielders.

bleedCrimson.net: Let's talk about your infield players and who you're looking at for the upcoming season.
Rocky Ward: At first base Chris Auten's back. He's the heir apparent there but a kid named Ben Hardy came in this fall and just absolutely lit it up. If you look at his fall statistics, of course fall stats you've always got to take with a little bit of a grain of salt because they're against yourselves. Ben hit .460 in the fall with 15 home runs, nine doubles and 53 RBIs. That's about as big a fall as I've had out of anybody. It's a bigger fall than what Billy Becher did or Ryan Kinning, Mark Aranda, any of those guys. The last guy, and we don't really keep stats for this but Adam Harvey as a junior hit 14 home runs one fall and that was just miraculous. He was the first guy to ever go into double figures in home runs [in the fall] and he turns around and hits eight that year or something. Those are the two guys at first base.

On the depth chart, [Leo] Aguirre who's been there as a backup is still kind of there but we've moved him to the outfield. Jared Jordan is a catcher who's really good around the bag at first and we'll play him there as a defensive guy. Hardy and Auten are going to continue to compete through the early part of the spring but one of them is going to DH and one of them is going to play first base. We've actually looked at Chris Auten at third some, he was actually a third baseman before he injured his arm and he's okay. His arm is really short, he's never really recovered from the injury he had but he's accurate.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net has been conducting weekly in season interviews with Aggie head baseball coach Rocky Ward. This week we checked in with Coach Ward and talked with him about Fresno State winning the Division I national championship and the effect it would have on the rest of the league and specifically on NMSU.

bleedCrimson.net: What does Fresno State winning the Division I National Championship do for the league in terms of respect, in helping some of the scheduling issues and what does it do the other teams recruiting?
Rocky Ward: It's a subtle thing but yeah the WAC at the end of the season when we all looked at it and we all had our hand in it, had dropped to the 16th ranked conference in the country out of 30 and we felt pretty strongly that we were much better than that and the schedule that we were forced to play and because so many teams in the league having difficulty finding close opponents to play during the week that we were being penalized by the new format. We met as coaches and are still trying to resolve that ourselves so that we can find a better way to schedule.

What Fresno's win did was it just backed up what most of us felt about our ball clubs that we were better than what we performed. We all kind of looked at the league and said there's a lot of parity in the league and I think in the coaches meeting there were a couple coaches that said "You know what, it's great what Fresno's doing. My ball club wasn't much different than theirs." I don't think any of us had the top to bottom pitching depth that they had and probably weren't as quite as good defensively. Obviously we were a better statistical offensive ball club than they [Fresno] were. But I think to a certain extent what could have been another year where the WAC dropped down in quality we realized maybe we didn't drop down in quality it was just one of those years where there was so much parity that we beat the heck out of each other which is basically what we did.  Continue Reading This Post >>

We spoke with Coach Ward about the upcoming College World Series Super Regional matchup between the WAC's Fresno State and the #3 national seed in the NCAA Tournament, the Arizona State Sun Devils. Having faced the Bulldogs nine times during the regular season and having coached NMSU at Arizona State in the 2003 Regional Coach Ward was able to provide some unique insight into the Super Regional this weekend.

bleedCrimson.net: What are Fresno State's chances against the #3 national seed Arizona State?

Rocky Ward: I think it's good for them because they haven't played them. Arizona State has a lot of tradition but they have as much year to year tradition against Fresno. They won't know Fresno very well. I think that Fresno will have a pretty decent advantage from that standpoint. Sometimes when the teams don't know each other very well the lower ranked team on paper has a little bit of an advantage because sometimes they have a little bit more motivation, they're a little hungrier. It's going to be the same type of things. When you've got a lower ranked opponent playing at a host's facility game one is absolutely imperative. They have to win game one. If they win game one I think it makes it a 50/50 shot for them.  Continue Reading This Post >>

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie baseball head coach Rocky Ward throughout the 2008 season as the Aggies open their third season in the WAC. In part two of the season's final interview Coach Ward talks about the upcoming conference meetings, next season's schedule and talks about the expectations for next season.

Read Part One

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about your upcoming schedule a little bit.
Rocky Ward: We're going have our conference meetings June 19th and one of the big things we're going to discuss are these four game conference series with doubleheaders that all of us despise because they're just miserable miserable days sometimes. Trying to figure out how we're going to change that. The biggest difficulty we have in the WAC is that all the teams are so different in their needs. Hawai'i is out on an island 2000 miles away. They can't midweek games because there's nobody for them to play. Who can spend $15,000 to get on a flight to go play one game on Tuesday? Nobody. We have a similar problem in the fact that we don't have very many teams around us and it's about the same type of deal. Outside of Texas Tech and New Mexico who play us every year you have Arizona and Arizona State. If I really pushed the envelope, I know Pat Murphy pretty well, they'd probably play us home and home as they have in the past. But Arizona's never played in Las Cruces and they never plan to and as a result I'm not going to go play there.   Continue Reading This Post >>