May 31, 2009

Recap | Box Score

Head Coach Steve Smith

On the game:

"We saw a great effort out of (Chauncy Handran). We finally got to him in the ninth inning, but by that time they had put a bunch of runs on the board. I was proud of our guys. We had all of the seniors out there and none of them wanted to make an out, so that kind of got us going a little bit and at least left a good taste in their mouth."

On the pitching:

"I think Jon Ringenberg did a great job for us. I thought this was a game that needed to be played the way that Minnesota played the game. Your pitcher was going to have to do something out of the ordinary, which I think their guy did because neither one of us wanted to go very deep into the bullpen when you still have two games to play if you want to try and win this regional. That is what I think was so special about what Handran did. The other thing is that you need to score some runs to do that and we just didn't score enough runs."

On electing to go with Woytek first out of the pen:

"What I was planning on doing was to start Verrett (against LSU) with Fritsch to come in after, leaving Willie to start on Monday on two days rest with all of the guys that threw last night behind him. Willie didn't get overextended on Friday so that wasn't as big of a problem as some of the guys that threw last night because last night was such an intense game. Although their pitch counts were not all that high, they expended a lot of energy because of the intense game. Jon actually got two more outs then I budgeted for. I just couldn't get out of the rest of them what I had hoped I would get."

On next year's prospects:

"I don't think we are going to lose as many as we potentially could have, and that is the disappointing thing. If we had played the way that we all wanted to play, we would lose a ton. We didn't play that way so we are not going to lose all of them. What that will mean is that we will have a pretty strong senior group, which we haven't had.... You need a good strong senior class and I think next year you are looking at a senior class of Tolleson, Campbell, Glime and Kempf. It is a little different animal."

RHP Jon Ringenberg

On his outing:

"In the first inning I think I just missed some spots. I was trying to locate pitches and I left a couple up. They are a good hitting team and they took advantage of mistakes and in the first inning I left one up and they took advantage of it. After that I just relaxed a bit and settled down and tried to locate my pitches."

On his changeup:

"My changeup is definitely my best pitch and I kind of relied on that this entire year. Today I was just locating it well and keeping it down. When I keep it down it is a great pitch that gets a lot of swings and misses. If I leave it up they will hit it and they took advantage of a couple that I left up."

LF Ben Booker

On the mindset of the team heading into the game:

"I knew that today we didn't want to get too deep into our bullpen. During pregame, Coach Thompson told us to bring our bats out and score a lot of runs and that's what we tried to do. In the end, it was short and just not enough today."

On the ninth-inning rally:

"You can't stop believing. When you get a leadoff double, nobody wants to get an out because this could be our last game like it ended up being. Everybody has that don't give up attitude and I think it showed. We just came up short. When (Coach Smith) put in some of those seniors in the last at-bat it was good to see them get hits. It shows you how competitive a lot of the guys are."