June 3, 2007

Recap | Box Score

Head Coach Steve Smith

On today's performance:

"It's a tough way to have your season end. Make no mistake about it, it's a painful loss, and for that I'm proud, and TCU should be proud as well. It's pretty tempting for guys with this day-to-day to start making their summer plans and not really give it a good effort because the road ahead is so difficult. Obviously our guys didn't do it and neither did their's, so we ended up having a great ballgame. As I said yesterday, when two good teams play one good team loses. We lost it, and it's a painful loss."

On Randall Linebaugh's performance:

"It was tremendous. He'd be in the rotation for almost the entire year. The very last conference series we ran him into the bullpen, and he came out of the bullpen and did us a great job. He's done that now several times. He really remade himself coming in during those situations, and today was probably his best."

On his decision to pull Randall Linebaugh in favor of Nick Cassavechia in the ninth inning:

"I had already made the decision to let Randall go back out because I thought he was throwing well, his pitch count wasn't incredibly high, and obviously we had more games to play. But I was only going to give him one guy on. Nick has been incredibly good and incredibly reliable. If I had (left Linebaugh in) and (Keith) Conlon hits a two-run home run to tie it off of Randall, you'd be asking me why I didn't take Randall out and bring Nick in. It's a crap-shoot, and I've got about 170 miles to think about it on the way home."

On the team's late-season run:

"Our pitching started to be better. Even though it wasn't always the starters, we had some guys that hadn't had the best of years start having pretty good outings, with Randall being at the top of that list. Even (Jake) Weghorst did a nice job out of the bullpen here late in the year. Jeff (Mandel) had a couple of his better games, Kendal (Volz) had a really outstanding game in the (Big 12) tournament, and that's really all this team was missing. In spite of the youth, we've got a pretty talented young team on the field, and when we haven't been able to get it done this year it's been because of the pitching. In the last few weeks it was much better, and I just liked the way the guys competed. There were no lofty expectations on these guys, and I certainly didn't have any. I told the freshman earlier in the year when they were trying to set goals before they'd even had an at bat yet, that you guys can't set any goals. The only way you can fail is if you quit, and they never quit. That's what I like about it. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't have anything else to go with it, you aren't going to get it done. What I like about this is that it hurt today."

On the season as a whole:

"This team had no seniors that anybody really knew about. That's what is so amazing to me is that now they know about some of them. We never thought about how we'd have to replace these seniors, but we are. We're going to have to replace a catcher who raised the bar a little bit and put up some really impressive numbers. (Chase) Gerdes had a great year in center field. We've had years where every starter played 56 games, but that didn't happen this year. We had guys go down. Our goals (next year) are going to be very high."

Baylor junior RHP Randall Linebaugh

On how he felt today:

"Everything was working well for the most part. I found myself pulling off a little early and opening my front shoulder on fastballs, but for the most part I was locating pretty well with the fastball. I had a good slider that I was able to throw when I was ahead and behind in the count. I told myself to go out there and fill her up because that's what we need. We need to go out here and eat up some innings and put up some zeros, and I did what I could. The defense played excellent behind me. Raynor (Campbell) made some good plays at third base, everybody was playing tremendous, and I couldn't ask for anything else out of those guys."

On being pulled in the ninth inning:

"Any time you work that hard and put so much effort into one single game, and you're throwing well, and things are coming out good for you as an outcome, you never want to be pulled. But like Coach Smith said, Nick's been there and has done tremendous for us in situations like that. If I could do it all over again, I would've had him come out at the same time, and I wouldn't want anyone else coming in behind me besides Nick. He's done an excellent job. It's just the game of baseball, and that's how it goes."

Baylor senior C Matt Czimskey

On the play at the plate that tied the game in the ninth inning:

"Paul (Miles) made a great throw. It was a little to my right and then I had to turn back around to the left, and I couldn't get my other hand on the glove. He came in and kicked my arm, and stuff just went everywhere."

On his feelings after the loss:

"It's pretty tough to swallow. Randall did a great job again. He came in and pitch unbelievable, and if you asked anybody on the team, when we're up 5-3 in the ninth and we bring Nick in, it's almost 100 percent for us. To see everything kind of fall apart like that, you have to sit back and just kind of relax a little bit. It was a good year for us, and I'm really proud of all of the guys on the team. They played really hard all year long, and I wouldn't have expected anything less in the last game."