Tuesday Baseball Press Conference
10/5/2004 12:00:00 AM | Baseball
Oct. 5, 2004
Head Coach Rick Rembielak
"We're having our last week of fall practice, and today is our first day of the Black and Gold World Series. We have five games set up. It is an opportunity to raise the intensity level up to competition level and finishes our fall practices. We split the teams in half and it concludes a good fall practice."
"What we're doing at this point is just putting in an evaluation. We're trying to find out what the players are capable of doing. It gives the coaching staff a chance to see what we need to do in the off season."
"We're trying to get a system in place and work on our philosophies. The players have responded tremendously positive. They are eager to find out who we are as much as we're eager to find out what they're capable of doing."
"Fall has gone extremely well. I just wish it did not finish as soon as it is, it'd be nice to be able to extend it a couple of more months, but its given us a pretty good gauge of what we need to work on in the off season."
"I think there is an ambition to get better in all phases of the game. It has been a very positive response out of everybody. If we got an opportunity to play next week, I think the guys would be coming out with bells on. They want to prove that we are a better team than what happened last year."
"I think our strength is our defense. Defensively we're a very solid team. It does start when you talk about defense. Our downfall last year was in the pitching, especially in the bullpen where we had some injuries. That's something we need to shore up. I think the starting pitching is going to be okay. But defensively that is going to be our strength. Offensively, we're going to need to do some things to move the baseball around. I don't think we'll have a power-type of ball club. It's going to be more or less a lot of action, moving the defense, and creating situations. The biggest thing we tried to accomplish in the fall is to not extend rallies for the other team. We call it crisis management. If something starts getting created by the other team, we have to get a handle on it. That's one objective we tried to accomplish. We have to understand what our limitations are as a ball club. I won't know until the season starts, but I think we're going to be a team that has to create things to score."