Darrell Butler Quotations

We're going to tie ourselves to his wagon and let him pull us around. He's our leader and he's really matured and accepted that role.

Whenever you play a program the quality that Belleville West is, you have to take those opportunities, make them count and score. You may not get another one. We were fortunate to have that inning where we got a lot of breaks our way.

Maybe the long inning bothered him, maybe he got tired. But no excuses, when you're up 20 runs, you throw strikes, he knows that. But he was very good in the early part of the game, so I'm not sure what happened. I liked his slider, it looked very sharp and his fastball was good.

He was on a strictly limited pitch count of 20 or less in any game today. The opportunity presented itself so we thought we'd use him then. To have your No. 1 come in and save the game like that, it makes me sleep easier at night.

He just feasts on us. He's a great kid. I really like watching him play from a coaching perspective because he brings a lot to the table, not only for Waterloo but for our conference.

Our kids work hard on defense. We left this field last night at 6:50 p.m., and if you looked at your clock, it was pitch black -- and that's the night before a day game. That's how much these kids care.

We've made some changes in Daniel and he's made a lot of improvements. Every now and then, though, he falls back into an old pattern. He just needs to have more repetitions of the way we want him throwing. Through the course of the year, he's really going to improve. He's got really good stuff.

When we start hitting, it gets contagious. It was nice to see us be on the giving side of one of those innings instead of the other side.

We are struggling getting guys in. We had runners all over the place and guys aren't scoring. Leaving guys on base is not something that sits well in my bones. We have to fix that and get guys in and be aggressive.

Our defense was stellar tonight. The way that Richard and Timmy play on the left side and Aaron made that unassisted double play to end the game. Our defensive effort was very good today.

That nine hitter, he's not there because he can't hit. He's just there because they've got so many other hitters in front of him.

That qualifies as a ton of runs. Our hitting approach lately has not been what we teach. So we tried to get back to basics yesterday and do what we really believe in and for them to stay within themselves. That's what I meant by a ton of runs, for them to just stay within themselves and do what they know they do best. And that's what we did tonight.

You can talk to all the coaches and they will all tell you they don't like going on the road in this conference. It's tough to play away from home and we will take any road conference win we can get. Those are all big wins for our program.