|
|||
|
|||
|
 |
|
|
ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIPMay 25, 2017Chris PollardRyan DayChris ProctorLouisville, Kentucky Duke - 4, Virginia - 3 CHRIS POLLARD: I'm really proud of our club. I thought for the second ballgame in this tournament, we pitched very well. We commanded the strike zone, played really good defense behind our pitchers, and we did a good job of staying in the moment and making plays late in the ballgame. We beat a really good team. We beat a team that's certainly going to host a regional. We beat a team that's a very complete team with both the ability to pitch and defend, but I think maybe arguably the best offense in the country. They're very difficult to put away. Our guys were up to the task today. Q. I didn't say, just talk about your hit there, it was kind of down to two outs, two on, I think it was even a full count. Talk about what you saw. CHRIS PROCTOR: Yeah, so I was pretty patient to begin with. I knew I wanted to get my pitch since it was based loaded, two outs. I knew I had to get a hit, and he missed and went behind I think 3-0 and so I was going to see a strike, saw a couple, and then the 3-2 pitch, runners were in motion, so I knew if I got a hit we were definitely going to get two, and I didn't try to do too much, I just kind of put my best swing on it. Q. Ryan, you guys faced them earlier this year, but not a lot of holes in that lineup. What do you think you did to kind of keep them under wraps most of the time? RYAN DAY: You know, I just kind of did the same thing we've been doing all year. I went into it trusting the process, trusting what the coaches and I have been doing all year, and I knew that actually they played well into what I love to do to hitters, which is force early contact, force groundball contact, and I just trusted my teammates, you saw that, my team picked me up a lot when I made mistakes, and stuck it out, right or die by that. Q. Coach O'Connor was talking about you guys are the nine seed but are as dangerous as most teams around. Talk about what your mindset was coming in here to try to win two games and now that you're in the semis. RYAN DAY: You know, we never really struggle with confidence. I think that even when we're behind, we never have this feeling that we're not going to be able to come back or not be able to make the next pitch. I think we're underestimated, too, and I think we're as special as any team when we're on. This is just a great group of guys that are really meshing together and really come together at the right part of the year. CHRIS PROCTOR: Yeah, I think we understand kind of where we're at, too. We understand we have to play each game like it's our last and we're embracing that and playing really loose. Like I don't think -- I was going to first base after that hit, and I was telling Coach, like it's the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me because J.J. was over on first just getting completely pumped up, and I felt like it was just a normal hit, like it was unreal. But yeah, we're doing a good job like knowing where we're at and knowing that we can play with any team in the country, and we can win. Q. How do you kind of now feed off of that moving forward? You've got a day off in between; how do you look forward to this and beyond? CHRIS PROCTOR: I mean, we have practice tomorrow. We're going to attack that just like a regular practice, get our swings in, get the juices flowing. I think we attack it just like we attack every game, kind of the same mentality that our pitchers are going to get first pitch contact on the ground, we're going to attack to our pitch, like as hitters, and I think that's really like the only thing you can do is approach every game pretty much the same with a few little tweaks here and there. Q. Chris, could you talk about having played yesterday and how much it helps to have played a game, the earlier game yesterday? CHRIS PROCTOR: Can you elaborate a little bit? Just like how that helps playing Clemson? Q. I'm getting my days mixed up. CHRIS PROCTOR: I think it helps because we kind of got one win under our belt, and I don't know, it's just another baseball game for us because we roll out there and we try to be the same guys every day. I think it helps, but at the end of the day, we still understand that like it's just another baseball game and we need to attack it just the same. Q. Ryan, the ball that Coman hit in the sixth to left field, what did you think off the bat, and how relieved were you to see that stay in the ballpark? RYAN DAY: Off the bat obviously I wish I had that pitch back. I kind of hung a changeup there. Off the bat I was worried but I saw Jimmy had a read on it, and when he came down with it, it was just surreal, it was the best feeling ever, just knowing that I never really -- it didn't really hit me that it could go out, it was just kind of a routine Jimmy is there. I have faith in my outfield, and he showed that he's an amazing outfielder right there. Q. Coach, what I was getting at is what did you think about the format coming in -- CHRIS POLLARD: No, I knew exactly what you meant, and I think it did help us because you don't get a chance to -- in the tournament setting, you don't get a chance to practice at the ballpark before you play, and I think we had a little bit of an advantage there in that we were comfortable in the ballpark. Now, UVA played exceptionally well. They played really good defense. That was a really difficult play on Clement to the backhand, and he tried to get the force out. But they certainly played like they were comfortable in the ballpark. But I think there is an advantage there when you've got one game under your belt just having a sense, and also the wind sort of blew the same that it did on Tuesday, so it knocked down -- you guys ask about the home run, any other time that you don't have that wind, that ball is long gone out of here. You know, off the bat I thought it had a chance just because of the wind, and Jimmy did a good job of not overplaying it. Q. Talk about what it means for you guys and this team to be in the semifinals. This league is so tough, and when you come in here, everybody expects to do it, but when you get there, it's pretty good. CHRIS POLLARD: Well, for our staff, for our coaching staff, it's great validation. I'm really proud of our coaching staff. They work incredibly hard. But for our players, I'm proud because the team you've seen out on the field on Tuesday and Thursday was not the team that played the first 15 or 20 games of the season, and we weren't very good at times early in the year, and we had to overcome that, and for our guys to stay together, to stay committed to the program, to stay committed to each other and really work to be playing their best baseball at the end of the year I think speaks a lot about the culture that's in that locker room and the leadership that's in that locker room amongst our captains and our leadership council and our senior class. Q. Talk about their lineup. In the eighth inning when Haseley, the lead-off walk, you've got Smith, Coman and Simmons coming up, not an easy trio to deal with, especially with a runner on base, how important was that to get out of it, what are you thinking, and in the ninth inning another lead-off walk? CHRIS POLLARD: Well, that was our first cue that Hendrix was tired, that he had some fatigue from Tuesday, because he just doesn't walk guys. He's been a guy over his whole career that's really commanded the strike zone, and when he walked Haseley -- now, granted, he made some good pitches in the at-bat. It wasn't like he was really throwing the ball and they weren't big misses, he wasn't throwing the ball to the backstop, but that was a cue to us that he was running out of gas a little bit, but he's such a competitor, we made the decision to stick with him, and he made some really good pitches to Smith, and then was able to kind of get some guys out on their front foot a little bit in the next two guys that came to the plate in Coman and Simmons. I think one of the biggest sayings for Nick that's really allowed him to completely turn his season around is the ability to throw his changeup to right-handed hitters, and he was able to get both those guys out on their front foot a little bit on changeups, and that helps his fastball play up. Q. I think I showed my confusion of the format; what did you think about the format coming in, and is it something -- CHRIS POLLARD: Well, what I've said to anybody that's asked me is it's -- we're very appreciative of the administration within our league of getting behind the 12-team concept. There need to be 12 teams at the ACC baseball tournament. Last year we had a scenario where we had 11 deserving teams for an NCAA regional bid, and you don't ever want a team to get left out of the NCAA tournament because they didn't make their conference tournament, and every year we're going to have guys that are sitting there right on the bubble in that 9, 10, 11 range that have a pretty good résumé, and so it was really important for us to maximize the number of teams that we get into postseason play, that we expand to a 12-team format. I like the pool play concept. Is it perfect? No, I don't know that there is a perfect format when you're trying to produce time slots for TV and there's a hesitation about going with a double elimination format because of the unpredictability of it and how it doesn't mesh well with TV. But I think all that said, if you ask any coach they'll tell you because we were unanimous in the vote that it's the right thing for this league to have 12 teams in this tournament. Q. When you look at Nick's journey, you're looking at 100 whatever appearances, you're looking at a Master's Degree, you're looking at a fractured skull, a lot of things. Can you describe -- CHRIS POLLARD: It's unreal. Q. -- what that's been like? CHRIS POLLARD: Yeah, I have very vivid memories of the night that he was injured, and Nick had already had a good career to that point. He had already been a key reliever for us out of the pen, doing what you see him doing in this tournament. But I remember the play. I remember the sound when the ball hit his head. I remember him falling back in the dugout onto the floor of the dugout, and then we didn't see him for the rest of the game. We had two more innings to play in that ballgame, and he was back being evaluated by our training staff. And then he wanted to be in our post game meeting when we got back into the locker room, and I'll never forget being in that meeting, talking to the team, making eye contact as I scan the room and I see him and his eyes are literally kind of rolling back, and I stopped our post game meeting and said, we've got to get him to the hospital. I remember being there with him at the hospital at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and not really so much worried about, okay, when are we going to get this guy back on the field for us but wondering if he's going to play baseball again, and he'll tell you that was a really tough period, those two months where he had to sit out. It was very difficult for him even to finish out the school year academically with his injuries. But to come back and all that he's accomplished since, and for him to go on this kind of magical run at the end of his career at Duke already with two Duke diplomas in his back pocket, it couldn't happen to a better person. He's a captain. He's been a leader in our program. He embodies everything that we hold kind of near and dear, the qualities that we look for in terms of competitiveness and toughness, and he's an academic, and he's very professional in what he does. He's very consistent with his approach. You know, if I had to pick one guy on our team to make this kind of run and to be having this kind of impact down the stretch, it would be Nick Hendrix. Q. Is there a game that kind of turned the season around for y'all late in the year? CHRIS POLLARD: As weird as it is to say, the exam break turned the season around for us. We had a really tough series at Notre Dame. We took one of three in a series where we were tied with them going into that series, right before the exam break, and we had been on the road three out of the previous four weekends, and they were all flights, and our guys were exhausted. They were gassed. And we had two -- we won one of those games. The other two we lost late, one in a walk-off. They scored with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the eighth and got us by one in the first game and then they had a walk-off hit to win the last game and win the series, and we had to scrape our guys off the field to get back to Durham that night. They were beat. And we just talked over the break about making the focus on getting better, not on where we were in the ACC at that time, not on what we needed to do to make the tournament or anything like that. We just said, let's take this time to get well, to get rested, and get better, and they embraced that, and we've played our best baseball coming out of the exam break. Q. So now you have Florida State or U of L Saturday. What's your pitching staff look like and have you been depleted so far? CHRIS POLLARD: No, I don't think so. You know, Nick Hendrix will be ready by Saturday. Jack Labosky had a really efficient ninth inning. We've got three guys in Karl Blum and James Ziemba and Kevin Lewallyn throwing the ball well for us down the stretch. Our bullpen has really stepped up, along with Chris McGrath. That was a weakness for us early in the season. It has become a strength. I like where we are, and we were fortunate with the way pool play fell that we got a day off after each time we played. We're not a very deep bullpen, and so these days off certainly help us to try to get ready for Saturday. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
About ASAP Sports •
FastScripts Archive •
Recent Interviews •
Captioning •
Upcoming Events •
Contact Us
FastScripts | Events Covered | Our Clients | Other Services | ASAP in the News | Site Map | Job Opportunities | Links |
|
ASAP Sports, Inc. | T: 1.212 385 0297
|