Brooks Shumake Quotations

Matt Price has done a great job for us all year. He's got great poise and that's one of the things I like about Matt. He looks like a baseball player out there.

I was sitting in the dugout thinking earlier in the game that it would be a little bizarre if we would've won 2-1 again. I'll take a 2-1 win any night, but I sure do love those 6-1 wins a little bit better. You can breathe a little bit easier.

He hadn't pitched in a while, so it was a good outing for him. He seemed to be pretty sharp with his location.

I was concerned about that inning because it was like all of a sudden we can't get the bunt down, then we execute the hit-and-run and we get in the same situation and then all of a sudden we can't get any runs out of it. It was frustrating. We missed a squeeze play, so we've got to get better on those types of plays.

Our guys are ready to go out and play baseball though. I think we're playing with confidence, playing well. The team is coming together. We had a goal to win the region (Region VI), we did that; we had a goal to win the district; we're one win away from that, and we're focused on finishing the district.

Our guys went up there and made contact and put the ball into play. We were fortunate to break that thing open there in the end.

We have to improve on hitting. Our pitching has been good, but offense is where we need to improve.

We definitely didn't want to lose two in a row. I wanted to see how the team would bounce back and I was proud of that. We are 4-1, but could have been 3-2 with two losses in a row.

We've got to be able to get up there, make some good contact, scratch out some hits. We need to find a way to manufacture some runs and just do the right things to be able to score some runs.

It's the same old thing (with Hartsville). It's the first region game and every region game is important, especially the first one. We know they've got a good ball team. They've improved a lot, but we hope to give them all they can handle.

They are more experienced this year. They were a relatively young team. Their pitching staff has grown this year. Traditionally, Hartsville has a good baseball program.

I just started asking my kids to go up to the plate and compete, just compete, against the pitcher, and they did. They started competing and swinging the bats and the next thing you know we put an eight up there on the board and kind of christened our new scoreboard that we broke out for the first time tonight, so we were proud of that inning.

He pitched through recreation leagues. He has a good, strong arm. We typically are not real crazy moving our shortstop off of shortstop, but we are looking at him as a closer and how he handles that role.