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March 24, 2012

Recap | Box Score | Photo Gallery media-icon-photogallery.gif

Matt Price
On pitching today…
I felt great out there again today. It was just that last pitch to Fontana. I left it in the middle and he hit it.

On being back in the bullpen…
It was exciting to be back in the bullpen again and having that adrenaline rush like I’ve had before in the past two years. I don’t know what the coaches have decided. I guess I’ll leave that up to coach.

On the series…
I think we showed some toughness the first game then we kind of fell behind. Our hitters started battling so that’s a sign for us. We have to keep battling and keep doing what we need to do to go forward.

Colby Holmes
On pitching today…
I felt good in the pen. My stuff was working. It was just that I left a couple pitches over the plate that were mistakes and they got hit a long ways. So leaving the balls over the plate was the main issue today.

Christian Walker
On emotions after this series…
There is always disappointment. Everyone in the locker room is disappointed. We should be. We had them where we wanted them, we came back, and we tied it up. We had it going into the bottom of the eighth. We had it set up for Matt Price to come in and shut them down and we couldn’t do it. That’s the way it goes I guess.

On progress for the season…
We are getting better. We are scoring more runs, but we are still not winning which is the ultimate goal. If they can score ten runs and we can only score nine, we still aren’t satisfied.

Joey Pankake
On RBI and facing the caliber of Florida’s pitching…
They had some great arms in the bullpen and starters. Every arm we faced this weekend was pretty good. I knew we had two outs and a runner on second. I was just trying to put the ball in play. I was just fighting, trying to get something through a hole.

Head Coach Ray Tanner
Opening Statement…
It would have been a good game to win after getting behind early. We got a tremendous effort out of Tyler Webb. Price kept us in there and we had some run scoring opportunities late, but we just weren’t able to push a run across. They came up with some good work out of the bullpen and we just weren’t able to finish it. Florida has a great club. They keep coming at you and they ended up getting a big hit from Fontana.

On Matt Price running out of steam…
Felt fine with him out there. He was 1-2 on Fontana. He ended up making a couple of pitches, then he left one in the zone, and that’s part of it. It could have been a 4-3, it could have been an F8, but Fontana ended up getting the ball hit in the alley. You have to give the young man credit.

On the team…
We’ve played hard, we’ve had some spurts that’s we’ve been a pretty good club but haven’t been able to put it all together. Hopefully we will make some strides and get some games back that have been close and have gotten away from us. All you can do it keep grinding it out. It doesn’t always go the way you want it to go. We played a great club this weekend and it was very difficult. We won the first one and had some opportunities late today and it didn’t work out. They were the better club and all we can do is keep grinding it.

On the last pitch to Grayson Greiner
I’ll have to look at the replay, but he threw a two strike breaking ball that looked like it was a hittable pitch in the zone, but Grayson froze up. He’s a freshman facing a guy that has been around the block a few times, and he made a pitch on him. That’s part of baseball.

On Tyler Webb as a starter…
I don’t know. What one of those things where he’s done a good job in the role that we have used him. It worked for us, but that’s something that Coach Meyers and I will talk about as we go through the week.

On losing the series after winning the first game…
I don’t know if frustration is that right word but certainly disappointed because we did get in a position to win. We were down by three, we went to Tyler Webb and he gave us some good saves. We went to Matt Price and got some base runners on. We had a chance to make something happened and we didn’t. It’s not like we didn’t have an opportunity, we did. Not taking anything away from Florida, of course, they came up with a big hit. We had two outs and no body on, and they got a couple of runners on and split the alley. They got a big hit and we failed to get one.

On Michael Roth as a hitter…
It’s one of those things where if he had made contact you wouldn’t be asking the question. He’s an older guy. I don’t have that many guys to turn to. Sometimes I have guys over there but they don’t have a lot of experience. You have to make some choices. That’s what I did. It didn’t work out but would I do it again? Probably.