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. This week Coach Ward talks about last week's conference sweep of Sacramento State, what it means for his club and what they need to do entering the final three weeks of the season.
bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about your thoughts overall from the Sacramento series.
Rocky Ward: Overall, Sacramento was a place that doesn't have real good history with us and not just a place but the team. We haven't done real well there and that's one of those teams that on paper you feel like you should beat. It goes all the way back to the Big West days. The first thing you figured you had to be able to do was beat Sacramento in the league and then you could start working on Santa Barbara, Cal-Poly and Pacific. We actually did pretty well against those three guys but could win against Sacramento and that's what kept us from getting over the top. Two years ago Sacramento came into our place and swept us at home and pretty much took our chances of a conference tournament [appearance] out of the mix and then we went there last year and lost three and that signified lost chances. There were a lot of negative traditions that were overcome by the weekend.
We had the two games with Texas Tech which were both difficult games to play because they were kind of meaningless to both teams, both of us are struggling in league. We played okay, we just didn't play very good defense in both of those games but we swung the bats pretty well and that might have got us moving offensively again. Looking it back it served a purpose.
The first game against Sacramento we got a very good outing out of [Tyler] Sturdevant, we did not play very good defense. In fact, we won that one 7-4 and as far as I'm concerned, their official scorer is nuts. I don't think a single run was earned, everything the guy thought was a hit. Even that we made two erros but in the game we could have been charged with as many as six. But we were able to still pitch around it and win.
bc.net: In that game, talk a little bit about that crazy put out in the bottom of the 7th which was scored as a 9-2-6-4-5-3-6 putout. They scored an RBI on it but you ended up recording and out to end the inning on the play.
RW: We caught two or three real breaks that game. We threw to the wrong base. The guy was going to score easily and instead of throwing the ball to second and keeping the runner at first, our guy throws the ball to home plate. You're a little peeved by it but the ball kind of came in and the base runner didn't advance immediately and ball kind of got loose a little bit and the guy took off and it happened to go right to Sturdevant and he picked it up and threw it to Stout who threw it to Auten, I don't even know who all got what, but I know that two outfielders ended up touching the ball and I think Sturdevant ended up in the play again and he was at home plate when it started. It was a crazy, dumb rundown. It was kind of a completely idiotic baseball play that we ended up benefitting from because it ended the inning. We made the mistake to start the thing in the first place and then ran the worst rundown ever. The bottom line is we threw and caught the ball often enough to wear the base runner out, he finally just gave up. It signified that we did not play well but we managed to figure it out.
Then we swung the bats. We hit four home runs in that game. We stayed hooked up offensively. We were as disciplined and as good as we've been all season. We had a real tough hard-love practice on Thursday when we came into town [Sacramento]. I put them out in a scrimmage format with me as the pitcher in an effort to show my pitching staff that just by throwing strikes and making them put the ball in play, that you shouldn't give up 10, 11 or 12 runs like we had against Fresno, like we had against Tech. Just by avoiding the walk. I also wanted my offensive guys to know, I know how to pitch you. I know where you an hit it and where you can't. We had just come off a Fresno series where we had real good scouting reports. We knew where to throw these guys. The reason we gave up so many runs is we walked too many, plus we didn't throw the ball to the right locations. I'm going to show just throwing the fastball, no breaking balls, no trick stuff, I'm just going to throw the fastball. It's your job as hitters to take those pitches you don't hit very well and be selective. When I make a mistake, that's when you've got to get me. If I don't make any mistakes you've got to find a way to foul off some pitches off. So it was really a good workout. Guys responded to it well. I got after a couple kids who hadn't been doing what they were supposed to do.
We followed that up with a little bit of a team meeting. I don't do a whole lot of that, it's a football thing. Your team meetings are generally done right before games, during batting practice and maybe after games. You play so much there's only so much talking you can do. We sat down and I went through each kid and told them what their role was. This is what you need to do. This is what we're asking you to do. Marcus Quade, you haven't driven runs in for us like we wanted you to. You're an RBI guy, you proved that a year ago but you started out the year as a real disciplined hitter, you're third in the nation in walks and then all of the sudden you're acting like a run scorer. You're acting like your number one priority is to get on base. I said, that's not it. You're an RBI guy, you're playing in an RBI position.
We talked to Lucero who's hitting .083. We reiterated the fact to Justin, you're there to play defense. You give me good quality at bats, draw walks, do everything you can to fight for every at bat. Don't start stressing because you might be embarrassed about your batting average. You're doing the job we want you to do as a defender. You're of great value to us.
So I finally got to get one on one with all the players on the club in a group discussion. Made points. Colin Crouthamel was the starting DH to start the year. Tyler Hardt is clearly the starting DH now, especially with the move to Lucero in second and Scaperotta in left. Tyler's got to DH and we have to have his bat. So that pushed Colin out, plus Colin has not been going real well. Then we brought Nick Cjeka back into the mix who hadn't played a whole lot. We missed Leo Aguirre this weekend because his mother passed. So our one kid who had established himself as a legitimate pinch hitter was not there anymore and I was able to talk specifically to those kids. This is your role Colin, you were a starter, you're not anymore. You've got to be able to come off the bench and hit. You've got to prepare for that. So there were some things that we were able to do that set the weekend up and we had fairly decent reasonable baseball luck on the first day and a good pitching performance out of Sturdevant. We didn't play real clean baseball but we won and we made the plays when we had to and got the hits when we needed to.
bc.net: Talk a little bit about game two which you won 5-3.
RW: We followed that up in game two with Goin, they scored early off of him but then he got stabilized and shut them out the rest of the way. It's a 3-3 game in the 8th and we got a good quality pitching performance. In that game, those three runs were all earned against Heath. We started the game off with a play where they got a basehit and they hit a ball up the middle and Stout made the play up the middle and flipped the ball to Marquez at second and Marquez dropped it and they called it a hit. And you're going, no that's an out, that should be an out or it's an error. Both of those runners score, both of those would have been unearned. Their official scorer didn't see the game the same way we saw it. So the stat sheets the first two days didn't represent really how well we played defensively, which we didn't, but at the same time it didn't represent really how the games went. They were pitched much better than what they were shown. Sturdevant didn't walk any in the first game and Goin walked a couple. He hit four guys which he has a tendency to do. He's a pitcher that throws inside and that's what he does. He hits guys because he throws in on the plate and when he misses a little bit and they choose not to get out of the way, they'll take hit batsmen. He threw real well and then they finally cracked defensively in the ninth and we scored two and won it 5-3. We felt like guys really played hard. They didn't play with the trepidation that we had played with the last two or three weeks where things would go good and then one thing would go bad and they would kind of snowball. They were tougher this time through.
bc.net: Talk a little bit about game three. You won that one 11-5 to complete the doubleheader sweep.
RW: [Sebastien] Vendette really pitched outstandingly. We went out and handled that game pretty well. We used momentum and we played much better baseball. They scored their runs late. We were up 10-1 and a pitcher's job up 10-1 on the road is to throw strikes and that's exactly what Sebastien did. He centered some pitches and made them put it in play which is what they did. So they were kind of four meaningless runs where Sebastien showed us that he's maybe reached that level of maturity that we need him to reach and done what he needed to do. So we pretty much dominated that game as we did in game four. Smith goes to the mound for his second start. He started Tuesday against Tech, pitched well but we had defensive problems again that cost him some runs [on Tuesday] and we played very very good defense on Sunday and he goes eight strong innings coming off a Tuesday start where he went five. To add to this, two pitchers who had pitched very little, Noah Garza and Matt Van Deelen, they come in and pitch as setup and close guy in the series.
Beyond just winning the four, Marcus Quade had a great series with the bat. Hardt continued to stay hot. Scaperotta had just an okay series Leghorn, Busani and Auten had very good series. Stout and Marquez in the top of the lineup really didn't have a very good series but they hit some balls hard. Sacramento really has a quality defensive ballclub. They've got a center fielder who can really run it down, they've got middle infielders and third baseman, they're all real good quality defenders. That's probably the reason why two weeks ago they swept Hawai'i at home. They're a good offensive ballclub, they play real good defense, their pitching is very average but Hawai'i is a team that doesn't have a very good offensive ballclub and their pitchers throw strikes generally and put the ball in play and so I can see how Sacramento would have swept Hawai'i. They're good enough to do that, they matched up better. Now it'll be interesting to see what happens the next four because I believe they're at Hawai'i. They'll play well there, it wouldn't surprise me if they split that series. It wouldn't surprise me if they won three out of four. The league's really balanced and there are some mismatches. At our park against San Jose we have a big advantage, yet at San Jose's park which we don't have to play at this year, we'd have a big disadvantage as we had a big disadvantage at Hawai'i in style of play. I think we have a big advantage when Hawai'i comes here in two weeks. We'll see, they still have Reno at Reno and Fresno at home to finish. They have the two guys at the top of the league still to play.
The good thing about the weekend is I got my ballclub back. I think the kids were really under a lot of stress the last few weeks. They were disappointed in how they played and played really tight. We finally got back to playing baseball again and doing what we're training them to do. More than anything I think that guys who'd gone where we really didn't want them to go, they started looking at what La. Tech did every day. We kind of did that when we were at Hawai'i. We lose a game at Hawai'i but La. Tech lost, we didn't lose any ground on the guy at the bottom and they really started doing that against Fresno when we got swept at home by Fresno. La. Tech was getting swept as well. That's not necessarily healthy for a team to start looking at the bottom of the league. Where you want them focused is at the top of the league. Now we're sitting in sixth, we're 9-11 but we're within two or three games of everybody except Fresno and Nevada. So we've put ourselves back in range. We have Fresno, yes it's on the road but heck, they beat us four times at home, the one game that we did beat them was at Fresno. I don't think the kids will walk into Fresno with anything on their minds but winning baseball games. They have a little bit more confidence now than what they did prior to this weekend. If you go into Fresno and win a couple of baseball games, we'll put ourselves right in the middle of the race. Nevada made than happen because they beat Fresno three out of four at home which was a surprise. Not that they did that but Fresno had won 10 in a row after us and they won the first game so they'd won 11 in a row and Reno was able to turn around and win the last three and kind of slow their momentum which we may benefit a little from going into this weekend. Teams play in streaks a little bit and Fresno's been known to be a streaky team. They've been known to play lights out and beat the heck out of you like they did at our home place, they've also been known to play poorly and get beat by the same type scores.
The great thing about it is I've got a club that's stabilized. There's some history from the last couple of years where we've been in kind of the same position and failed. So we broke down some recent traditional barriers that needed to be broken down. We have the goals we set out at the beginning of the year back in sight again where just last Sunday they looked a long way away. We brought ourselves back to the middle and the goals set at the beginning of the year were clearly to play in the middle of this league somewhere. We didn't think it was reasonable to expect us to play for a conference title but to play in the middle of the league, make the conference tournament and be ready to go win four games there and get a shot at getting to a regional again. Those are pretty realistic and reasonable goals. We've gotten those goals back in sight and that's really good.
bc.net: Can you talk about the position that your team is in heading into this weekend's series against Fresno State, you're right in the mix and if you split with Fresno State, win three of four or even all four against Hawai'i at home and four against La. Tech, you could possibly finish 1st, 2nd and certainly no worse than 3rd.
RW: Yeah, absolutely. That's in front of us. To be honest, this club, whether or not we're prepared to be clean enough on defense, our pitching has consistently improved throughout the year. You look at our stats and they're ugly as can be with a team ERA around 8 but that 7 or 8 ERA represents that our starting depth isn't real good. We feel good about the four guys we're going to the mound with in a four game series. We no longer have any midweek games to worry about. We're not going to be wasting any pitching innings on Tuesday and Wednesday like we have for the last month and a half. I think that we feel like as a team we can pitch over the last three weekends in a 4 to 5 ERA range. Which historically in this program because of what we can do offensively has been good enough to win a lot of baseball games.
The ballclub's not ready to start talking about winning the league title, it's just not. We've got to be really careful right now about putting a goal that puts too much pressure on them to achieve. The bottom line is we're doing what we've got to do, the best we can do to finish in the middle of the league with the best seeding we can get. Go into La. Tech for the conference championship, it's a ballpark that fits our team very well. It's an offensive type park and it just fits us right. Not a whole lot different from when we went into South Alabama in 2002 and won a conference championship. We went in there as a six seed in an eight team tournament, we were playing well towards the end of the year and that ballpark, the South Alabama ballpark, is sometimes a big ballpark but four days the wind blew out about 15mph and it really fit our club. Louisana Tech is a smaller park than that and is traditionally a very offensive yard. We're going to take each game at a time, which I know is the standard coaching statement, but that's really truly what this club needs to do. I don't need to put a big 'ole elephant in their path. I need them to be themselves, continue to improve, continue to progress towards the ultimate goal. The bottom line is the team that wins the championship in the regular season wins nothing except some trophy. They're not going to be an at-large bid. Our conference power rating across the league is not good enough to get an at-large bid in. There's going to be one team to get into the regional tournament and that's going to be the tournament champion. That's the one that comes with a trophy and postseason play and that's the only one that's of any importance.
In the next couple of years, sure, the goals are to set sight on both. If this ballclub does what it can do and plays well then sure, you're right. The league has come back to itself. Everybody's plus or minus a couple games from .500 except for Fresno and Reno's knocked them back down and Fresno and Reno are the one and two guys right now. But they still have a lot of games to play. The best scenario is just to play good solid baseball and have some momentum and confidence going into the conference tournament.
bc.net: This past week you were referring to it as hell week because of the tight schedule. Do you think that spending all that time together as a team helped bring the team closer together?
RW: The end result, analysis on the front side of that, I didn't think so. Coach Tidwell is the one that called it Hell Week. It was Hell Month, starting on the Reno trip, we went from Reno to Hawai'i, 10 days out, we came back in for a little bit, the tough home series against Fresno. The trip didn't end up being so bad. It really wasn't. Guys handled it pretty good. I think after the Fresno series, guys were disappointed and having them to myself so to speak, without any outside interruptions was probably an important time for us. We went into Tech, we didn't play terrible, we got beat twice but we're not real good in our down line pitching. The guys that are one through four have all proven they can play around our spotty defense a little bit. The guys outside that haven't been able to do that. They've made a pitch and a guy's made an error then they walk two. That's been a recurring theme out of those guys that aren't ready to deal with the pressure of not having good defensive plays. But at the same time, they don't have to serve that role anymore. Those guys that have been trying to start the Tuesday/Wednesday games are now guys that are going to be used in one, two and three inning stints where they have a better chance to succeed. So yeah, as it turns out, it was important and for it to have been in Sacramento, it's a breakthrough.
We've done two of things that brought our team into a different level. We beat Louisiana-Lafayette in 2001 to end the season. They were the big team in the league and they were hosting the tournament. When we beat them two out of three and with the combination of what the rest of the league did, all of the sudden they didn't qualify for their own tournament. It was a weird year where everybody was in the middle and then all of the sudden with the tiebreakers and everything they were out. Then the next year we go through and make our first conference tournament and we win it.
Then in '03 we make a breakthrough with a roadtrip to FIU (Florida International). FIU the last couple of years have been just bad. But back then they were one of the top two or three teams in the league and we went in and swept them at FIU and when we got to the selection show at the end of the year, our power rating was about 44, FIU's was 39 and then the other team was 46, Oklahoma State, my alma mater and we get selected and those guys don't. Why didn't FIU get selected? Because we swept them at our place. It was simple, they were eliminated because of that. Then Oklahoma State, I think they ended up a game below .500 in the league and it was kind of a standard thing back then that if you weren't above .500 in your league they didn't select you.
So this series may be a little bit of what I've been talking about. In the Big West we couldn't beat Sacramento so we never competed in the Big West, we haven't beaten Sacramento in the past two years and it probably represents why we haven't been to the tournament the last two years. There are a lot of things this goes to. Having defeated them the way we did it at the time we did it, isn't just for now. It'll serve purpose a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. When you talk about trying to establish a base of a program where you can start each year with the idea that you can play as a base you can play in the middle of the league. If you have that key player or two, if you have that key series or two where you steal a game or two, you can win the league. That's what we want to be. That's where McKinley Boston and my administrative people want me to be. They have a good understanding that our facility is not what these other people [in the WAC] have, our budgets still aren't quite what other people have. They've done a lot to help us in the last couple of years but we're still behind. So we're pretty happy that we're in range of reaching those goals and this weekend goes a long ways to it.
bc.net: A couple of weeks ago when we talked after the Reno/Hawai'i roadtrip you made the analogy that you guys were out of the boat but not sunk, after this weekend I assume you've got to feel like you've climbed back into the boat and are drying off, can you talk a little bit about what the sweep this weekend, it's not something across the league that we're seeing very often, what does it do for your kids mentally and injecting some energy for this last stretch run to close the season?
RW: What it really did is, you had to go into Sacramento and win two, to be able to stay in the boat so to speak. The sweep not only got us moving again but takes a lot of pressure off these kids for the Fresno weekend. They're games that you felt like you're going to have to win two at Sacramento, that you're going to have to, absolutely win one in Fresno and then if you did that then you were going to have to win two or three at home in each of the two series. When you deal with "have to's" that can be good for the team that has traditionally done it. But the teams that traditionally have not done well, if you go across the 25 or 30 years of history, it's not just recent stuff, sometimes that's too much pressure. I think to a certain extent that's a little bit of La. Tech's problem. This is the first conference tournament that they're going to host and their worst nightmare is playing out where they may not be in it. There's still a lot that has to be done between now and then and their seven run in the bottom of the ninth to beat Hawai'i might be the thing they had to have happen. They ended up splitting at home which is not what they wanted but they were getting ready to be completely sunk if they'd lost that third game and they were down 9-3 in the ninth. So what the Sacramento series does is it takes a lot of pressure off this Fresno series and I think we'll have a ballclub that'll play better because of it. We'll see, if you go into Fresno and you get swept four, then you've got pressure back on you again.
bc.net: Can we safely assume that we'll see the black jerseys on Friday night? [Ed. note: The Aggies wore black jerseys in their victory on Friday, they wore the black jerseys again on Saturday and won both games of the doubleheader and so they wore the black jerseys again on Sunday and completed the four-game sweep of Sacramento State]
RW: You bet your butt we are. That was a unique thing, that was something we tied into it [winning]. There were a lot of things we were trying to get established and changed. You wear black and you win and you say, "hey, we're going to wash it and wear it again." They were wearing white both days and didn't have a black jersey so we didn't have to worry about it. It's just another one of those things. I don't want to wear it out too much because I'd like to have a little magic left in the black jerseys for a championship game. It's one of the crazy things you do as a coach but they all mean something because these kids are under a whole lot of pressure. Not just in playing the game but in school and everything else. It's been a really difficult year for these kids, they've been asked to do more than any group of kids I've been around with this crazy schedule and there have been times where they just didn't have enough energy to respond to me. But one thing I'm proud of is when we do room checks and we check around, you look out around the swimming pool and we happened to be at a hotel that had one, guys have got the books out and they're doing their work. They're doing what they're supposed to do.
