Ed Yates Quotations

We're going to find out pretty quick if (Saturday) was a good thing for us or not. From the way the first half shaped out, we have five of our last seven (league) games on the road.

One thing is that they walked 12, hit three batters and had two errors in the field. There's 17 free base runners. But we did hit the ball well - a lot better than we have been.

I feel good about this one - it was a good win. Honestly, any win is a good win for us, but this got Buddy some experience on the mound. He moved the ball around and he's really learning how to pitch instead of just throwing.

He cruised through the first like they weren't even here. Then all of a sudden, here comes the second and he was struggling getting his curve over. I was warming up some people, because I told my assistants if he can't get his curve over, we're screwed. He's the type of pitcher who has to work some of his off-speed stuff. If he can't get it across, it's going to be a long night for us.

I thought that was a big mistake on their part.

Overall I thought we played pretty well. For us to get this win, it's a good one to start off with against a good team.

Overall I thought both teams played well. The score was only 4-1 until the seventh when we broke it open.

Overall he pitched real well. He only had two walks. The wind was blowing pretty hard, but overall I thought we played pretty good defense behind him.

We did what we came here to do. We didn't win the league, but we did what we came to do today.

The good news is that there is some experience there today that we should be able to pull out of the game. And I sure hope we do.

I've been working with eight guys. There are still some things to piece together, but things are coming around.

That's not bad for a freshman. The two he walked were in the fifth. We threw one of them out trying to steal and we turned a double play to get the other one.

They had a no-hitter going against us through five. We had a one-hitter on them through six.

For Colton, I think the offensive part of his game is going to be OK if he doesn't come in putting too much pressure on himself. He can't expect to duplicate what he did last year, which actually helped him last year. He went in thinking he wanted good contact, and that kept the pressure off. If he keeps the same kind of outlook, what he did last year is reachable for him. It really is.

It is what is in the minds of folks now.

They walked four guys and hit another in the seventh inning. When you're on our side in a situation like that, before you know it you have five earned runs on only one hit.

If you remember, he really started coming on at the end of last year. He hit the ball real well again today. We only had two hits through the first five innings, and he had them both.

Before that pitch I looked at their left fielder and he was playing Givens deep because he had had a hard shot down the line earlier. I looked at the shortstop, because my concern was not the left fielder. I knew darn well he couldn't get to it. My question was, could the shortstop get to it? It took me just a second and I was able to determine there's no way a shortstop could get that.

The league is going to be tough, but, if you look at last year, the league helped prepare us for what we were up against in the tournament. It's tough teams all the way through, and that's good. It's a tough league.