May 25, 2007

Michigan Head Coach Rich Maloney

Opening statement ... "Obviously, we all feel like a dagger just hit us, very disheartened in the fact that we didn't get it done - disappointed because we had many opportunities in two days. We just weren't able to get over the top so very disappointing especially at home we couldn't get any momentum going until really the last inning when we rallied against that outstanding closer which really said a lot about our kids, when we were standing on the brink of elimination and we fought back against the best closer around. I honestly think he's one of the better closers, definitely the best we've seen including all the teams we traveled in the south and the west. To rally back, I think it says a lot about our kids. On the flipside, we had an opportunity to take it back and we didn't get it done. That was very disheartening because big mo shifted to our side. We made one poor pitch.

Michael Powers pitched phenomenally. That's the best I've seen him pitch. Unfortunately, he made one mistake ... you've got to give Corey Wine credit for taking it into the seats because Michael was red hot, he was on fire - he made one mistake they made us pay for it."

On coming from behind again ... "In this game we made a lot of good pitches, but we made about three pitches that were bad at bad times. To their credit, they answered. When we made a mistake, they took advantage of it. That was part of never getting momentum. Ohio State scored three in the first and took the crowd right out of the game and we never got the big inning going so we never got the energy. I've talked to the kids about the energy level - we didn't come with the energy level. Part of it is when you give up runs early, it puts you in a really rough position. The flipside of it is somehow, finding energy, it always has been a key to our success. I'm a high energy guy and I like a lot of energy. Our team has always fed off of energy and for a while now, for whatever reason, we haven't been able to muster, get in that role where we have that energy. I've been talking to the team about it for a few weeks trying to stir it up. It was just kind of, I don't know if it's a lull, that we were in, but that certainly didn't help it -- it set it a little bit deeper.

Hopefully, by what we did during the regular season we get into the NCAA Tournament because we've got a team that warrants statistically being in there. When you are first in hitting, first in fielding and second in pitching in the Big Ten, pretty much says that you're the team. We won by two and a half games so hopefully at the end of the day, when they select, we'll get another opportunity and hopefully we'll show ourselves much better than we did in this tournament."

On stating a case to the selection committee ... "I think it would be easy to say we had a 16 game winning streak and a 10 game winning streak. We went down after we played the first 12 games, we were 6-6 with one run losses, two to East Carolina, one to San Diego who has in RPI right around the top 10, and we were winning 6-4 in the bottom of the ninth in that game, East Carolina, we lost two one run games and one of them was in extra innings and then I would say we beat Oklahoma, we beat Mississippi State at Mississippi State and we beat Troy who is a good ball club. At that time, our strength of schedule was 21. So the games I could control schedule-wise, I controlled. ... Now our strength of schedule is like 113th but we beat pretty much everybody we had to play when we came back home. If you really look at our record from 6-6 to 39-16, it means we were 33-10, that's a pretty impressive record."

Michigan outfielder Eric Rose

On the final innings ... "In terms of recollecting the game, (the homerun) it was a dagger in the heart - a 3-2 pitch, two outs, to see it get over the fence was disheartening. But, at the same time, we came in and had just scored three runs off him the previous inning so I think there was a lot of confidence that `yeah, we can get at least one run off of him.' It's tough to deal with but we had a lot of confidence coming back to hit."