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.  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 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.  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 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.  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. 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.  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. 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.  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. 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.  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. 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.  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. This week Coach Ward talks about last week's games in Hawai'i and looks ahead at this week's games against Panhandle State and the very important series against Fresno State. He also talks mental drain that the compressed schedule puts on student athletes.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk about the game against Hawai'i-Pacific?
Rocky Ward: We played under tough conditions. Their field was a natural grass field unlike the other eight games we played that were on the field turf material. They had rain and so it was pretty slick in a lot of spots. We kind of caught a bad break because Dixie State was supposed to go in there and play on the weekend as part of a series for them. Because of ATA Airlines going under, that's who Dixie was scheduled to travel with and they couldn't rebook fights. So their series was cancelled and instead of facing their [HPU] number six pitcher we faced their number one, number two and number three. They just took all of them and shared the game and they were pretty dadgum good. They had a left-hander that was in the low 90's with a good breaking ball. Then a right-hander came in that was a high 80's guy with a real good slider. I knew they had a pretty good club and I knew they had those two kids that really had good numbers. We did a good job against them. We got a home run out of [Geoff] Downing that was a key blow. Their shortstop had a tough game, he made three errors that led to a couple different runs. Again we couldn't close it out in the bullpen. Of course it was a game we really had to be careful who we were going to use because we were going to play four games in the next three games against Hawai'i in conference. Bottom line is they tied it in the ninth, we avoided losing it there, we came back with one in the tenth, held them in the bottom of the tenth and won a 6-5 game. It was a good baseball game under tough conditions and the kids did well.  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. This week Coach Ward recaps the last week's games against CSU-Pueblo and Nevada and looks ahead at this week's games against Hawai'i-Pacific and Hawai'i and talks about the keys to winning this weekend's series against Hawai'i.

bleedCrimson.net: Can you talk a little bit about this last week's games against CSU-Pueblo and the weekend series against Nevada?
Rocky Ward: The games against Pueblo were kind of a microcosm of what we've done. You win easily and then lose easily. Those two games were more about getting some kids healthy. Stout didn't play in that series, Hardt played a little bit but sparingly. We were trying to get some of our depth developed a little bit and at the same time give a couple kids on the mound a chance, who haven't pitched very well and give them a chance to get some activity. They were specifically scheduled for that. You kind of expect to win them both but Pueblo played good baseball in the second game and did a good job against us and you tip your hat to them.

As far as the Nevada series we got a great pitching performance out of [Tyler] Sturdevant in game one and scored enough to win. We actually had an outstanding performance out of [Heath] Goin, not quite as good as Sturdevant. We just were not very good in the doubleheader against Nevada, offensively. They played very very good defense. They made three or four really critical defensive plays on the plus side, stopped a couple of our offensive innings and gave them some momentum. Goin went eight innings and gave up seven earned runs, you look at the game and say well he didn't play real well, he kinda did. Once they got on top the wind was blowing and it was cold and the conditions were not very good. They happened to be the team to get a couple balls up in the air into the jetstream, we just couldn't get that done. Then Vendette pitched outstandingly in game three and the bullpen failed us. We got a five two lead in the eight and we give up a big seven spot in the bottom of the eighth inning. Again you've gotta give some credit to Nevada. Nevada's a very difficult team to play on the road. They've a very good home team, they always have been. They have very nice crowds, they have good expectations.   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. This week Coach Ward recaps the last week's up and down performances and looks ahead at this week's games against CSU-Pueblo and Nevada.

bleedCrimson.net: Can talk about this last week, you had kind of an up and down strange week. You won 15-2 over UNM on Tuesday, then lost 13-1 to UNM on Wednesday, then you come back and win 12-2 on Friday against Texas-Pan American, then lose 10-3 on Saturday and then come back and win 24-5 yesterday.
Rocky Ward: Well that's kind of the essence of the week, it was inconsistent as can be. The good thing about it is really for this five game stretch we've shown our top side of what we're gonna be able to do offensively. We've also shown the weakness that we may have some down days. I don't really want to be a momentum offense, I want to be an offense that can build innings and finish them. I don't want to feel like the only way we score is if somebody hits a home run and gives you momentum. That's the only real concern I have is we kind of did that. When we got down a little bit, we couldn't get the offense moving when we needed to. Good quality offensive clubs, they may get your for three or four innings like Pan American did against us on Saturday where basically nobody scored through four, and we've still did a good job with their guy, we just couldn't get a key basehit. But when they scored all of the sudden the offense couldn't get moving. That's the only real concern with it. But you know you win 3 out of 5 and we're starting to feel like we win a couple more than we lose. Up until this little stretch we'd played on the bottom side of it a little bit. It's been a club that has done exactly that, we're 12-12 and we've played 12-12. We've played about 12 real good games and about 12 average games, average or bad depending on which ones you're talking about.

Overall to be honest I think the week was a pretty decent week for us. Did we reach the ultimate goals? No. But I think the guys are starting to think that we can do that. The schedule up until Pan Am was a pretty difficult schedule. It's ranked in the Top 50 in the strength of schedule on WarrenNolan.com and strength of schedule is one of those things like RPI it's based on what your opponents did. Pan Am was the first lower power rated club, it's the first one in the bottom 150. Everybody else had been in the Top 150 or Top 100. We did on Friday and Sunday what we should have done and Saturday you kind of wonder where things went. We didn't do either thing very good. We didn't pitch real well and didn't hit real well.

The overall feeling with the club is that we're getting better every day. Now we're gaining a little more confidence. Every time that Sturdevant and Goin went to the mound, they really pitched well. Vendette pitched well through four [innings] and then kind of lost it in the fifth and sixth.  Continue Reading This Post >>