I'm proud of them. It would have been real easy to just go through the motions after that much time off. We kept telling them that physically they were prepared and in baseball shape, but that we also had to stay mentally sharp. Tonight, they looked mentally sharp. They came out ready to play. |
I've never seen a ball leave the park like that before. |
If you don't win the first game, you need to come away with the split. We did that and you have to be pleased with that. That was big for us. |
If you look at the conference schedule, there's going to be a lot determined here in the next three or four weeks. It's going to be tough but that's the way we want it. We want to earn everything we get. We've got to be ready to play. |
It?s going to be a special place. And not just for baseball, but because you have that whole row for the athletics complex. We?re going to have these nice new fields, something all the kids can be proud of. |
Our guys showed a lot today. We go down, give up a home run, don't score. We continued to battle and have good at-bats. |
Ryan Lee and Brandt Barnes did not have their best stuff tonight. But they battled and made the pitches that we needed when we needed them. |
That was a much better game, offensively. We swung the bats well enough to keep us in the game and we made the plays when we needed too. Timely hitting is what is going to win games. We got the timely hits when we needed them. |
That's what we need this time of the year. We need to be hitting the ball and we had a good time at the plate. We're making plays and pitchers are throwing strikes. This is when we need that to happen and it's starting to come together. Hopefully we'll keep it up. |
The tradition is strong here and it's been an excellent program the last several years because of the players. Those expectations are there. The expectations are high and these guys know that. |
There's not a part of our schedule where we can relax. |
They're already talking about adding on or building a new one. |
This is what we need this time of year. We need to be hitting the ball, we had a good day at the plate today. We had some good at-bats. |
Two conference wins - we'll take them any way we can. We just battled back, chipped away and were able to score some more runs. |
We are so ready to play. Winning would be great, but we just want to get out there. |