June 13, 2003

Omaha, Neb. – Comments from USC head baseball Ray Tanner following the Gamecocks’ opening round 8-0 loss to Stanford Friday at Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium:

“Our hats off to Stanford. Let’s give credit where credit is due. John Hudgins was outstanding on the mound.. Stanford was certainly the better club here today … Hudgins used both sides of the plate. He got his changeup over, he works fast and that’s why he is their starting pitcher in the opening game of the series for them. He wasn’t better than our starter today (David Marchbanks). I told David before the game, that he would have to match their pitcher, and unfortunately, he didn’t. I think David was trying too hard and may have been over-throwing some … Going into this game, I knew that Stanford would be very good. They just don’t make many mistakes. We played very poorly in the game. Early on, we made a lot of mistakes, both pitching-wise and on defense. You can’t give Stanford those kind of opportunities. Had we played a perfect game, it may have gone down to the wire, but Hudgins wasn’t giving us anything. We would have had to be almost perfect and we weren’t. It was a poor game on our part. They had double digit hits. You hate to lose anytime, but we just didn’t play very good baseball … We wanted to try to come out aggressively early on and we weren’t able to get anything going … We have battled back from adversity before; we’re going to try to regroup and come out and have a great game on Sunday. I think our guys will respond Sunday. They have some maturity about them.”

Comments from USC second baseman Kevin Melillo:
“(John) Hudgins was an excellent pitcher today. All game long he kept us off balance with his fast ball and change up. He had a lot of our guys out on their front foot. He threw strikes when he had to and it worked out for him … (On Carlos Quentin’s outstanding catch of his line drive early on in the game): “You have to give him credit for making the play. I didn’t see it, because I was running hard and making sure I touched first base. I saw him jump up with the ball and the umpire signaled me out. I went back to the dugout and the guys said he made one great play to catch the ball. He’s a first-rounder and he is going to make plays like that.”

Comments from third baseman Brian Buscher
(On losing first game of CWS in 2002): “We’re just going to take this one game at a time. We fell behind 11-0 last year, battled back and took it one game at a time.”

(On Stanford starting pitcher John Hudgins): “He threw three different pitches for strikes all day. He kept me off balance all three times.”

Starting pitcher David Marchbanks
(On his performance): “I didn’t establish the strike zone early today. We’ll be back on Sunday.”

* Coach Tanner said that the starting pitcher for Sunday’s game would likely be senior left-hander Steven Bondurant, but that decision would be finalized on Saturday.