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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE BASEBALL CHAMPIONSHIPMay 27, 2017Romy GonzalezJim MorrisLouisville, Kentucky North Carolina - 12, Miami - 4 JIM MORRIS: First of all, North Carolina has got a great club. Probably got the best club -- I think I can say they have got the best, the most talented team we play this year. Ranked No. 2 in the country. Outstanding in all phases of their game, and if you don't play well as a team, then you're going to get your butt kicked and we got our butt handed to our tonight. You've got to learn from this experience, if you want to advance and do anything, you've got to learn from this and get better. I think our team has gotten better as a group but you're going to have to play good against people like Carolina. Q. Now with your post-season fate now with the NCAA Tournament committee, if you had a chance to talk to them, what would you tell them? What's the case for Miami making the NCAA Tournament again this year? JOHNNY RUIZ: Well, I just think that we've played really well down the stretch. We had a lot of injuries in the middle of the year and took us a little bit to get going. I think we've played really, really well, just as good as any of the teams that are fighting for a spot to make it here at the end for an at-large bit. North Carolina is a very, very good team so I don't think that one loss to them should be indicative of the way that we've played the last -- the last, I'd say, two months, because we haven't lost a series since March, I believe, Coach said earlier. I mean, that's unbelievable in the ACC in my opinion. A team that does that should be able to go to the tournament -- other than Virginia. ROMY GONZALEZ: The first half was definitely a roller coaster to say the least. We had a lot of injuries, and key guys like John Cooper not being on the field that really hurt us. But definitely the second half was completely different and I think we're deserving to get in. Q. You got off to the hot start, what was it, just was he hanging stuff or were you guys just seeing the pitches that you were looking for? What exactly happened there at the beginning? JOHNNY RUIZ: I felt like he was leaving the ball up a little bit. That first inning, at least me, I got a good pitch to hit. I had two strikes and I had burns on third, so I was just trying to put the ball in play. He's a good pitcher. He's a young kid. I know that he's going to be very good in the next coming years. I said it to these guys during the game. I go, "This guy is going to be really good." So in the next couple years, watch out for him. He's a very talented kid. Just obviously didn't have his best stuff today which he is which he is earlier. ROMY GONZALEZ: Earlier on he was leaving a lot of pitches up. We were just making him pay for that. But yeah, hats off to him. He's going to be a good pitcher in the coming years. Q. With the delay, you guys had about 70 minutes to wait. You guys were warming up and all of a sudden you're told again that there's lightning in the area and you had to sit down for another 30 minutes. How much -- did that kind of take the wind out of your sails, getting ramped up and having to sit back down again and then trying to ramp up one more time? JOHNNY RUIZ: I don't think it really affected us. There's no excuses as to what happened. They are just a really good team. I felt like we played hard, and I said before, if we play hard, you've got to kind of live with the results. We just didn't execute. We didn't pitch very well. We made some errors. I thought that the effort was there. We just didn't execute and we just didn't play well. But I felt like the effort was there. We all played very hard. We lost to a very, very good team. Q. Beyond tonight, what's the takeaway from just the experience here at the tournament and just the momentum you had coming in? ROMY GONZALEZ: I mean, I think we proved ourselves; that we can hang with some good teams, beating Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, especially in a late-game fashion like that like we did. We got off to an early jump today and just couldn't hold them off. North Carolina is a great team. We made a lot of mistakes and they made us pay for it. JOHNNY RUIZ: I felt like we played really well coming into the tournament and that first inning, we were like, wow, we might be able to beat these guys. But we just weren't able to keep it going, and against a team like UNC, you've got to be able to manufacture runs. I know they have put up ten runs, at least, in every single game, so they can really swing it. So I knew that the three runs wasn't going to be enough but just to get that momentum in the first inning really helped, and I mean, obviously the rain delay didn't help. It kind of slowed the momentum down a little bit but they already had guys first and second with no outs, so that inning really kind of changed the game. If we were able to get out of it with maybe one run or no runs, then maybe the game would have been a little different. But with like good a team with them, you've got to play really hard and play well every single inning because if you don't, they are going to make you pay and they made us pay in those last four or five innings. Q. If you had a chance to be in with the selection committee tonight or tomorrow what would you tell them? What's the case for Miami getting an at large bid this year? JIM MORRIS: Our strength of schedule is good. I don't have all the numbers off the top of my head. Our strength of schedule was good. Our RPI is 39 and it's really come up a lot because it was like a hundred a month and a half ago. We made a lot of improvements from that point. We haven't lost a series since March. We've got everything written up. Cam can give you that. We met today and talked about the things that we've done good as a team but we've got some guys back in the lineup like Johnny, and Carl Chester has taken the time. He had two surgeries. He had a foot surgery in the summer and a hernia surgery in December. He's getting back on his game. He's been leading off the last seven or eight games for the first time because he was a solid 6'3 .660 guy out of high school when he gets here and breaks his foot. So we have a lot of guys, but Cooper Hammond was big and he pitched good in the tournament, some of the guys like that, be good. Even the first few innings tonight we out-hit Carolina. We just didn't get our big hit; we could have scored more than three runs, and the bottom fell through in the end. But we threw a lot of guys, got some guys in the game late, which you like to do for your guys. Q. How much did the delay or delays cause you to change any strategy or change what pitchers you ended up going with? JIM MORRIS: Well, it had no more effect on us than they did. Maybe they had more talented pitchers coming in, because they have very talented players. But we had to make a pitching change just like they did with the long rain delay and bring another pitcher in. That didn't work out. Mike didn't have his best stuff. He walked some guys and we walked quite a few guys tonight, and when you walk five, six, seven, eight guys, you're going to pay the price against a club like this. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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