bleedCrimson.net Weekly Coach Ward Interview

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.

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.

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.

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 one of the season's final interview Coach Ward talks about the conference tournament, looks back at the season and talks about his seniors.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk about the conference tournament this past weekend.
Rocky Ward: We'll start with the All-Conference guys, we got six which ties the most in school history so we're happy with those individual accomplishments. From the standpoint of games, we didn't play terribly well. The Hawai'i game was okay. We didn't pitch real well in the middle and we had a rain delay that cost us Heath Goin. He was a little sore going into the game and as soon as the two hour rain delay happened we couldn't bring him back. He was already tightening up and we were just trying to get him through the next inning. We gave up a couple to go down 3-1 and then had a rain delay for a couple hours and off that we bring in Van Deelum and he throws an outstanding slider that a guy hits off the end of the bat and just squirts by the first baseman for a hit to go up 4-1. You're down 4-1 in the sixth and the guy is doing a pretty good job on the mound and we really thought we were still in it and we were but we just didn't get good relief pitching. We give up a six run inning in the bottom of the seventh that put us in jeopardy. We matched it with six in the eighth but it was just a little bit too little too late.

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 this week's interview Coach Ward talks about trying to win four games in a row and the excitement level of his club right now.

bleedCrimson.net: The Aggies swept Sacramento State earlier in the season giving you four conference wins in three days, with a similar setup of needing to win four games in four days does that give your team any kind of mental advantage?
Rocky Ward: I hadn't thought of it that way. It's pretty subconscious but I think it does. I know that when we won the Sun Belt tournament we had swept Arkansas State for our first sweep in conference, maybe in team history. So yeah, I think there's a little advantage to that but at the same time people always say that, especially in baseball because the game finds a way of evening itself out just the way it's played, it's hard to beat a team x number of times in a season. Yet, I'd much rather be on the team who had won four in a row playing in the fifth game than the team that had lost four in a row and waiting for baseball to turn around and help them.

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 one of this week's interview Coach Ward talks about this past weekend's series against Louisiana Tech, the differences between playing in the tournament and regular season and talks about the first round matchups.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the series this past weekend with Louisiana Tech.
Rocky Ward: It was kind of like what I thought it would be. Kind of difficult to play because Louisiana Tech came to play and they were relaxed and we didn't play terribly well. When you look back to it, it wasn't that bad. It was reasonably decent baseball with the exception of the six error game where we just didn't play real good clean defensive baseball and kind of felt like we gave one away. Outside of that it wasn't too bad. I was a little disappointed in the first two games, the doubleheader because I thought we got really good outings out of both Goin and Sturdevant and I was rooting for their seventh wins. Six or seven wins in a season for a college kid doesn't seem terribly impressive but with the number of starts they get and the way college baseball is with closing games out, it was kind of a big deal. With this schedule every starter gets three or four less starts. On a personal note for those kids I thought it was neat to have a couple of seven game winners and with the tournament potentially eight.

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 this past weekend's series against Hawai'i, the series finale against Louisiana Tech and talks about the mindset of the team heading into the conference tournament.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk about the series against Hawai'i, you started out with two come from behind wins and then on Saturday you had kind of a weird day.
Rocky Ward: We continued the momentum and played pretty well but we kind of set a precedent on Thursday when we gave up five in the first but we managed to shut them out the rest of the way and managed to win 7-5. [Tyler] Sturdevant really pitched well after the first inning and we did a good job offensively.

Then in game two we gave up runs early, gave up the lead early again but the offense really had a good day, the final was 13-8 and it wasn't as close as that. Once we got to the top of that game we got after it, we had that game won for a while. Of course we had game four won like that too, that's what made it a weird day.

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 getting a split in Fresno against the league leaders, talks about sustaining momentum over the final two weeks and heading into the conference tournament and the importance of playing their final two series at home.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about this past weekend's series with Fresno State? You got exactly what you needed with the split and came really close to winning all four.
Rocky Ward: It was a good weekend. We got momentum out of the Sacramento weekend and kids were feeling good about themselves. We've gotten good pitching, our defense has still got some cracks just not quite as big. We've swung the bats. As an offensive team we seem to have found the confidence and kids are starting to get it. They're starting to understand how important every single pitch is and guys are going to the plate and battling every pitch. We've benefitted from it. It's a big deal. [Tyler] Sturdevant did not throw well on Friday and we still had a chance to win it. They had to bring Sunday's starter [Tanner Scheppers] in to close that game. We took them right to the edge and looking back to it you kinda go "Geez, if we'd just a normal start that we'd normally get from Sturdevant, we'd have won that one."

Then you get a great start out of [Heath] Goin and really an outstanding offensive day in game one of the doubleheader. We just kept coming at them. We'd score, take an inning off then score, take an inning off then score again. It's one of those things we'd struggled with at times during the year, early in the year, we'd score early then we wouldn't score much late once we got into a little bit of pressure. We didn't let that happen to us. Part of that is the fact that as you move on through the year, guys trust Heath to keep us in the game. Not only did he keep us in the game, he pitched very well, shut down a very good offense.

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.

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 disappointing series against Fresno State, looks ahead at a very tough week traveling to Lubbock, TX, Roswell, N.M. and Sacramento, CA in a three day span, and talks about his kids' performance against Top 10 pro prospect Tanner Scheppers.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a about the weekend series with Fresno State. In the Friday night game you put up a good fight, how much did that game have an effect on what happened with the rest of the series?
Rocky Ward: I think had an effect in the fact that Fresno got off to a good start offensively. The one achilles heel for them has been their offense. They've been either really really good or really really bad, there's not much in between with those guys. Unfortunately they were really really good all weekend.

Combined with a pretty average or below average performance from my pitching staff, we walked a bunch of guys, didn't have very good command and we built a lot of innings for them. We didn't make them earn a lot of stuff that they got. Once they got going, once we walked a guy or hit a guy, then they'd finish it with base hits. We seemed to consistently provide them with opportunities throughout the weekend and they got on a roll and we couldn't get them stopped. So yeah, game on impacted it that way.

I think to put up 10 runs against that pitching staff was quite an accomplishment. It was a normal day, it wasn't a windy day, it was light winds under 5 mph throughout the game. The score wasn't high because of the wind. Both offenses did a pretty good job and they took advantage of most every mistake.

Fresno came in hot and they've now won nine or ten conference games in a row and their offense, if you go back and look at the numbers the past two or three weeks, their offense has scored a lot of runs.