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NCAA MEN'S COLLEGE WORLD SERIESJune 15, 2013Pat CaseyMichael ConfortoKavin KeyesAndrew MooreOMAHA, NEBRASKA Mississippi State – 5 THE MODERATOR: Coach, it's a great game. Give us an overview from your dugout. COACH CASEY: I thought that we battled the entire game. I don't think we were very efficient with what we did with ten hits. Mo had one bad inning and got real sharp. And we're playing a club that's got really good pitching out of the pen. Doing a good job playing a really good team and, like I said, when we get ten hits, we've got to be better. We didn't execute in certain situations. And like always, little things win and lose big games. THE MODERATOR: Questions. Pat, what went into your decision to go to Boyd? COACH CASEY: Because Mo was getting tired and Matty has been outstanding all year long. And we got a guy that hits 75, 80 points higher against right‑handed pitching than left‑handed pitching, and it was just time to make the move. Max was not available today. Q. Michael, from first base, what was your reaction when the ball hit like‑‑ I guess left the bat in the ninth inning? From your perspective, did you think it was gone? MICHAEL CONFORTO: Yeah, I thought I had a shot. And I think Daniel put a great swing on a pitch that was left up. And from my perspective, it looked like it had a shot to go out, and obviously it didn't. Q. Pat, so what does this do to your rotation? Does that mean that Wetzler starts on Monday? COACH CASEY: Wetzler will start on Monday. Q. Andrew and Pat both, just the two‑out approach, Wes had the two‑out double, doing it all postseason. How tough is that to deal with? ANDREW MOORE: He's a great hitter. Has a good approach up there. And that was my biggest problem today is I got two strikes with people, and I just didn't make pitches to get people out. To get strikeouts or outs, you've got to expand two strikes. So that's just something, just a small adjustment we'll have to make for the next game. Q. Coach, don't want to get ahead of ourselves here but do you have a feeling, you are going to ride Matt out of the bullpen going forward like Patterson in '07, or do you think maybe he'll start again looking forward? COACH CASEY: Well, I hope he starts again. But we're a little bit handcuffed a little bit with Max being down and Matty's threw, what, 14 pitches last Monday. He's plenty ready to go. He could close on Monday if he had to. We could save him to start. It's tough when you lose a guy that you finished with for virtually the last portion of the season, not to have him available. And with a lead, four outs to go, Matty's been outstanding all year long, and just didn't get it done. Q. You guys are going into the looser bracket. You have some experience with that. How do you feel about your opportunity now? COACH CASEY: Feel the same as I felt today. I feel like we're going to come out and compete and we'll play the best baseball we can. And you're going to win and lose games by doing the little things, and if you do the little things right, you give yourself a chance to win. If you don't do them, you create an opportunity for the other team to beat you. And we're going to come out and play the way we played all year long. We've been in this situation before, and we lost first game at UCLA. We lost the first game at Oregon, Kansas State. So we've had our backs pinned before. It's not completely foreign territory. Certainly we'd like to be in the winners bracket. But that's the way it goes. Q. Michael and Pat, did you guys feel like after you got the 2 in the first, you took your foot off the gas, or do you feel like you just didn't get hits to fall? MICHAEL CONFORTO: I wouldn't say that we took our foot off the gas. We still put up ten hits in the game. And I'd say that we didn't, like Coach Casey said, we didn't have those productive at‑bats when we needed to. But as far as coming out with the two‑run lead in the first, I think it was just the flow of the game. Their pitcher came out and made some pitches after he gave up two runs in the first and found a way to get our guys out. So I wouldn't say that we took our foot off the gas. I think we just needed those clutch hits in the right times. COACH CASEY: They came out and got three in the top of the second. So I mean, we didn't have time to take our foot off the gas, really. I think our guys play hard all the time. I think you're dealing with 19‑ to 21‑year‑old kids. I think that this club here has never went out and not given us everything they've got, and there are times they play better. There's times you do things you shouldn't do. And that's why they're in college. And I'll just go ahead and get on that bus and feel pretty good about the guys that are riding with me. Q. Michael and Kavin, how good was their pitching, especially the relief corps? KAVIN KEYES: Pitching, coming out of the pen was pretty good. That lefty kept the ball in the zone. Kept it down. That last guy looked like he was pretty good. I didn't get to face him. But he handled it pretty well and left that one ball up to Danny that he got but didn't have enough on it. MICHAEL CONFORTO: Pitching out of the pen is real good. You can see by the way they pitched all year and they're very comfortable going to the pen fairly early. And I think the first lefty, he was good. He had that good slider and he threw a lot of strikes. And the last guy was fairly firm and he knew how to get guys out. He's a competitor. He works hard up there. So that's why he's their closer, that's why they go to him. Q. Kavin or Michael, just how hard to adjust to the different styles of pitchers they bring in from Graveman to sort of a soft‑tosser and what Holder does bringing the fastball and the curve? KAVIN KEYES: You have to do it all season, make adjustments as a hitter. It wasn't a huge thing, but we had to make sure that we knew what we were doing and stay with the same approach that we had all game. MICHAEL CONFORTO: I think the coaches did a good job of letting us know what was coming in, and we had seen some video and some stuff, and I think Kavin's right, we had to do that all year. And I think‑‑ I don't know, I think we did pretty good, just not good enough, I guess. Q. To both the hitters, as Coach says, you guys have been in tough situations before. As you look at the road that's ahead of you, how much confidence does that help maybe give you guys as you prepare for what's in store? MICHAEL CONFORTO: Well, hopefully there's a lot of baseball left. We've got to come out on Monday and be ready to play, and this team knows how to do that. We know how to bounce back from a loss. Like Coach Casey said, we've been in this position before and we plan on doing the same things that we've done all season. And so after that, got more baseball, just more games to play, and hopefully we've got a lot more coming up. Q. Coach, Pat, were you surprised at some of the lack of execution, Andy Peterson in particular failing to get the bunt down a couple of times? COACH CASEY: I'll tell you what, we've played 62 games. And I'm not going to single anybody out about execution. We do things as a team. We do them well or we don't do them well. And as a team, we didn't execute the way we feel like we could execute in certain situations. Andy Peterson has been a ten for us all year long. The guy's a fabulous player, and he's going to give me everything he has every time he goes on the field, and we need to do things as a team to score more runs. And we played a very, very good baseball team that has very, very good pitching, and we didn't get it done. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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