April 8, 2011

Head Coach Steve Smith

On the game tonight:
"The story of the game is Taylor Jungmann. That is the only story in the game. He was just big time tonight. It was fun to watch and I would have liked to of had him on our side, but he pitched extremely well. He not only had overpowering velocity, but he was also right on the money. That was the story of the game tonight."

On Taylor Jungmann's improvement:
"He is a lot better than last year. Last year he struck out one guy. He has really made a jump and I congratulate him and all of their staff. He has always been projectable, and when he was a freshman he had a pretty big role for his team at Omaha. That, to me, said a lot about the kind of kid he was way back then. Now you just have the maturation physically to where his stuff matches up with his make up and that is pretty special."

On Logan Verrett's performance:
"I thought Logan competed well. I thought the whole environment elevated him early in the game. A year ago I thought he outpitched Jungmann, but tonight he didn't. He made some mistakes. He couldn't handle the running game. He couldn't handle the bunt game, but other than those mistakes I thought he pitched well tonight."

Sophomore 1B Max Muncy

On the game:
"We are feeling pretty good about it even though we lost 11-3, because without that one inning we are tied or winning. We put up two runs against (Taylor) Jungmann. I know that is better than what most teams have been doing against him. He is a good pitcher and at some point you got to give some credit. He is probably going to be a top-five pick this year. We've got to get rid of it and come back tomorrow and be ready to play."

On the positives he can take out of the game:
"Yeah, like you said we got a couple homeruns and we had some hits. The big thing is these guys probably have the best pitching staff in the Big 12, so to know we can go out there and get hits gives us good confidence coming into tomorrow. It is still going to be a really good guy, but it is not their best guy, so we know we can go out there and compete."

On what is working so well for him at the plate:
"You can't explain anything like that, if I did I would be hitting better. I am just seeing the ball well and getting good swings on it is the big thing. If you make contact with the ball there is always the chance something is going to happen."

Sophomore RF Cal Towey

On his game:
"It was good to just have a good game in conference and try to start the series off well, but I wish things would have turned out better for us as a team."

On the nine-run sixth inning:
"It is frustrating, because you don't want that to happen in this big Big 12 series. We want to do big things. We don't want to have them put up a nine-spot when we were still in the ball game. It was only like 1-0 or something. We didn't want that inning at all. ."

On the positives he can take away from the game:
"There are some positives things you can probably find in each at-bat. I feel like we didn't totally give up after that (big inning). It is hard when you are down 11-0, but guys still put together good at-bats and we still got two more games left in the series to do something."

On what he has done to improve his hitting:
"I have no idea. It has been two years in a row like this, but I will take it as long as I can find my swing sometime in the year."