March 11, 2015

Recap | Box Score | Photo Gallery

Head Coach Chad Holbrook
Opening statement:
It’s kind of been a long time coming to have a game like that offensively. Gene (Cone) got it started in the first inning with a hit and we had a great inning there and only had two runs to show for it. The double play kind of kept the game close there for the early part of the game, but any time you can get Max (Schrock), Max had three hits, obviously K-Mart (Kyle Martin) swung the bat very well, and Alex (Destino), those three guys are legit middle-of-the-lineup type guys and tonight they showed it. Cone and (Jordan) Gore kind of set the table for them and it was nice to see Hunter Taylor get a couple hits too.

Reed (Scott) pitched the ball very well, Preston (Johnson) got hit a little bit but he threw strikes in there and we played defense behind him and the other guys threw the ball extremely well. It was good to see Matt Vogel throw the ball the way he threw it. He punched out the side there and had great stuff on his fastball. He was very, very aggressive. It was a great night for us, and hopefully that puts us in a good frame of mind heading into the weekend. I look forward to having a good workout tomorrow and then SEC starts this weekend and we all know what that entails. All in all, a great night.

On Schrock’s improving play:
He’s at peace. We had a long talk on Tuesday, I think he had to get a lot of things out he was trying to keep an even keel and trying to stay positive when everything that could go wrong for him offensively was going wrong. I think that after that conversation that we had I felt like after he walked out the door I just said he’s fine. I didn’t think he was pressing any more I think he kind of let the first part of the season go and he’s ready to try to start making a few things happen. From a fundamental standpoint, he’s realizing that he’s a line drive hitter. When you’re scuffling a little bit a lot of his outs were lazy fly balls. Max, as you could see by his ground ball to shortstop today, can really run. When he misses the ball, if he misses it on the ground he’s still got a chance to get a hit. If he takes a bad swing and miss it goes up in the air he doesn’t have the power to hit it over everybody’s head, so let’s utilize what the good Lord gave you a little bit more and maybe that’ll get us some more hits on the board and he can run the bases and steal some bases. All he needed was some hits to start feeling good about himself and now I think he’s in a good frame of mind.

Junior Max Schrock
Fine-tuning his swing ahead of SEC play:
The whole team has been working with Busch (volunteer assistant Brian Buscher) on shortening up our swings and I think that showed today and it was big a game before SEC play starts so hopefully we can ride some momentum into that first game. I’ve been working on simplifying my swing and finding a swing I can repeat. That’s really been my focus, just simplifying everything. It’s no good if I can go out there and go 3-for-3 today and 0-for-5 tomorrow.