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NCAA MEN'S COLLEGE WORLD SERIESJune 19, 2013Matt BoydPat CaseyKavin KeyesJake RodriguezOMAHA, NEBRASKA Oregon State – 1 THE MODERATOR: Pat, an overview. COACH CASEY: Obviously I don't have to say how well Matt pitched. It was it's amazing. He saw two guys, Aaron Slegers and Matt Boyd, and Matt was just a couple of pitches better. It was a heck of a baseball game. We could just never get anything going offensively. He handcuffed us. And fortunately for us, Matt was as good as I think anybody we've seen throw here in the College World Series. THE MODERATOR: Questions? Q. Matt, you had a great breaking ball going there from the beginning it seemed like. Did you feel like establishing that pitch early was key for you? MATT BOYD: No, definitely. It was‑‑ my curveball and slider were working very well today. And being able to put it on both sides of the plate and get ahead with it early, down in the zone, opened up both sides of the plate for my other pitches as well. Q. Pat, you've said that Matt is among your favorite players of all time. COACH CASEY: I told you not to tell people that. Q. Why is that? What goes into that? COACH CASEY: When you coach young men, and it's difficult enough, but he's a no‑maintenance guy. He takes care of everything. He goes to school. Does well in school. Trains. He's the guy you never have to worry about. He's just easy to coach. He's just a great kid. Came to college for all the right reasons. He's just a great person. And I always had a great relationship with him. He came to our camp when he was young. And he's just‑‑ he's a really fun kid to coach and he's a great man. You're welcome, Matt, especially when he throws shutouts he's a really good guy. Q. Jake, from your standpoint, you've seen this guy throw so many times, I guess from your perspective, is this the best you've seen him? And just talk about what you saw from behind the plate. JAKE RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, Matt obviously, he talked about getting ahead with his offspeed pitches, but his fastball was great today. I think he got ahead more with his fastball, worked both sides of the plate with his fastball. He was down with all of his pitches. That's why he was so successful. And we needed him to throw off speed pitch early or late in the count and he hit his spot and threw balls in the dirt and did a great job all night keeping them off balance. Q. Matt, Slegers was saying he knew pretty early on that runs were going to be at a premium and that kind of helped provide him with some motivation. How about you? When did you realize that this was going to be a pretty tight game? MATT BOYD: Regardless, I really tried to focus not on the scoreboard, just making pitches. With the 0‑0 game, 1‑0 or 10‑0, score shouldn't matter or dictate how you pitch. Still go after guys, try to get ahead and just get outs. And the whole game that was my focus, just really trying not to focus on the score, just making pitches, focus on one pitch at a time. And gosh, guys played great behind me. Coach called a great game. Jake, man, it was money back there, blocking balls in the dirt. And it's like I said, the defense, it was awesome. Q. Matt, you've been a good team guy, filling the closer role, but how excited were you to get back in the starting role and pitch in the College World Series tonight? MATT BOYD: Very excited, very blessed and very grateful. Dreaming of this as a little kid. Pitching in the College World Series. Whatever capacity, starting, closing, playing first, DHing and everything like that. I love to help out the team, whatever is needed. And just grateful for the opportunity. Q. Coach, I noticed that it was a little bit of a conversation between you and Coach Smith after the game. Could you tell us what you talked to him about? COACH CASEY: I got a lot of respect for what he does and how he goes about it. I just think he's done a great job. We played him down in Texas in a tournament. And I could tell then that he was doing all the things that‑‑ they were going to be successful. They got good athletes. They run it right. They do it right. I think he's a real quality coach. And I was excited to see him get to the College World Series. I know how tough it is, fighting some of the things you gotta fight when you're not in a major conference or you don't have that street cred yet. So I was just happy for the guy. Good man. Q. Coach, faced Mississippi State before. What can you take, if anything, from the first game? COACH CASEY: There's a lot of things that I think that we can take from it. One is they're very competitive, very good. The bullpen is very strong. They've got a quality closer. But hopefully, when we look at the tape, the difficult thing here is you don't know who you're going to play. So we'll go to work on that again tomorrow. But John does a great job with their guys. They're loose right now, playing well. I don't know how many games they've won in a row but they're certainly playing good baseball. Q. Kavin, talk about you tagging up. Was there any indecision, did you take a peek on your way down? KAVIN KEYES: I didn't know if it was going to get deep enough or take him far enough left that I would be able to tag. But Jinx is over there and he's saying yes, yes, yes and making sure that I was going to get there. And the ball was on the left side of the plate, I think, and so it was away from me, but I still think I would have been in there safe. COACH CASEY: I enjoy watching Kavin run. KAVIN KEYES: Good thing we had the fastest guy at third base. COACH CASEY: That would be Andy Jenkins. (Laughter). Q. Kavin and Jake, special pitching duel here. What was Slegers doing against you guys that made him so successful? KAVIN KEYES: He left a bunch of fastballs up that we kept popping up, and we just couldn't square a bunch of those up. And he squared up a few and right at him, and that was how the game went for both teams. So we just had to stick with it on defense and Matt pitched great. So we were lucky to have that happen. JAKE RODRIGUEZ: I think for the most part, he was commanding his fastball as well and his slider was real good. I think he started to throwing a change up to lefties there at the end. Command of his pitches.  He threw a great game. But we were able to scratch a run there, but it was two good pitching performances. Q. Pat, I noticed in the ninth you didn't have any action going in the bullpen. Did you have a pitch count in mind or anything with Matt? COACH CASEY: Pitch count in mind, about 12 for the last inning. No, it would be hard to take Matty out in that situation, as well as he was pitching. And we were going to win or lose with him on the mound. And I think he would have been a hard guy to take out in that situation. And he was well rested. He threw what, on Saturday? I don't know when he threw against Kansas State. It was Saturday, so he's really only thrown about 20 pitches since Saturday. So he's had nine or ten days in between his starts. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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