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Texas Longhorns Baseball – Coach Garrido Talks After the Sweep
(Image via The University of Texas Athletics)
After the Texas Longhorns Baseball team defeated The Baylor Bears and secured the series sweep, coach Augie Garrido spoke with the media to talk about the series and his surging baseball team. Here is what he had to say.
I think over the weekend what we demonstrated was three different ways to win a ball game. That's what it's going to take. It takes versatility, you can't just have one dimension to your offense that will win a game. I think we have more balance in our lineup now, for sure. Any part of that lineup can score runs in any one of the innings and we proved that over the weekend and over the week. I think that part of it, we really haven't added anything that's dramatic. We're just executing the things we know how to do more consistently. We're making more productive outs.
C.J. Hinojosa
Last night it was C.J [Hinojosa] with two fly ball outs. Things like that is what I'm talking about. We got our bunts down today, all but one. I mean, pretty darn good. We have a lot of different ways to advance runners, either by stealing, bunting, quality at bats that produce the right kind of outs, productive outs. It all leads to runs scored and that's what we're trying to do. You can say, you only got four runs today, but there were some balls scalded. They hit some balls really hard, and I think that's [what we really take away].
I think the pitching was good all weekend and you're not going to win without pitching and we got that and the defense played extremely well behind them. All of the positions are functioning at a pretty high level right now. Can we get better? Absolutely. Will we get better? Probably so because we have the right attitude toward team.
We have 32 guys in the locker room that are coming out here every day to help the team win the game. That's what it takes. You can see that in their unselfishness at the plate, their patience at the plate, the way that they're taking their at bats with runners in scoring position. You can read all of that and see that they are confident in what they're doing. As that goes on, it will be challenged. They got a little frustrated when they didn't get hits today because they've had a lot of hits. But hits are just about feeling good. It doesn't necessarily produce runs so I think that we got better over the week. We had a good week and everyone contributed.
Nathan (Thornhill) was excellent today. But that's within the framework of what he's capable of doing when he focuses on hitting the mitt and not feeling responsible for winning the game. That's the demon in that whole deal. If you feel like "We have to win the game," well the pitching staff is a lot looser now. They can see that we can get runs and they see that we can come from behind. They see that we can find ways to win. Now that relaxes them a lot. The nuisances of this game are so subtle that most of the coaches, including myself, don't really know why one team wins and the other team loses. It's an unbelievable game. It really is.
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James Schleicher is the publisher of Horns Illustrated magazine. He's also a fifth generation Texan and lifelong Austinite. Follow @HornsIllus twitter to keep up with all things Horns Illustrated.
That's what it takes. You can see that in their unselfishness at the plate, their patience at the plate, the way that they're taking their at bats with runners in scoring position. You can read all of that and see that they are confident in what they're doing. As that goes on, it will be challenged. They got a little frustrated when they didn't get hits today because they've had a lot of hits. But hits are just about feeling good. It doesn't necessarily produce runs so I think that we got better over the week. We had a good week and everyone contributed.
Nathan (Thornhill) was excellent today. But that's within the framework of what he's capable of doing when he focuses on hitting the mitt and not feeling responsible for winning the game. That's the demon in that whole deal. If you feel like "We have to win the game," well the pitching staff is a lot looser now. They can see that we can get runs and they see that we can come from behind. They see that we can find ways to win. Now that relaxes them a lot. The nuisances of this game are so subtle that most of the coaches, including myself, don't really know why one team wins and the other team loses. It's an unbelievable game. It really is.
