Oregon Ducks Baseball:Notable Quotables

Brett Thomas

"Appel's firm. He can reach three digits, he's got a power slider and he's got a pretty good change. We got some work to do, but we did fairly well against him last year and hopefully we can do the same and have some success this year as well."

"We want to prove that we can hit anybody, and so far he's been the talk of the draft. Hopefully we can prove that we belong, it's a team thing. It's going to be 9 guys against him and hopefully we get all 9 to work hard and see what we can do with it."

"We're going need to do a way better job at 2 strike adjustments. He has some filthy stuff, that doesn't mean we're not going to strike out. We just need to put the ball in play and good things will happen for us."

"We always have something to prove. There's always going to be someone to tell us that we're not good enough or we don't have enough draft picks or the pitching is going to carry us to Omaha. We really want to make it so the hitting can carry us at some point just like the pitching has."

"People are going to make errors. Hopefully they're physical errors and not mental errors. As you guys have seen, we're pretty good defensively and hopefully that will come back."

"All pitchers throw mistakes, and the biggest thing is we have to be ready for those mistakes. Once he makes a mistake we have to jump all over it."

George Horton

"Obviously [Mitchell] Tolman had a rough go of it in the UCLA series and yesterday was very, very uncharacteristic of us. It explains to me how special the .988 [fielding percentage] was. I think every once in a while that devil pops up on every college team and hopefully we've got those behind us."

"I thought our at bats against [Appel] last year were pretty special. It wasn't that we raked him by any stretch of the imagination but running deep counts, fouling pitches off. Duck after Duck with competitive at bats and consequently it ran his pitch count up to 150."

"The thing about this year's team, it's not that we rake those premier pitchers like Appel. We tend to give more at bats against more non Appel like pitchers, midweek kind of pitchers."

"[The pitching rotation] will be the same. We like the way that's functioning, even though we lost Friday and Saturday. Certainly Tommy Thorpe on Friday and Cole Irvin on Saturday did a nice job. One of the things I like about that, Cole Irvin has been one of our deepest into the game starter. If he can gobble up those innings and we can win, we're not sacrificing anything."

"Part of today's discussion is going to be ‘Why would we be complacent, when we haven't been able to tackle the giants of this industry?' We have a ways to go as far as calling ourselves national contenders. Until we can prove that we can get a series from Stanford, why would we suspect we can be competitive in regional play?"

"Stanford is heating up, so to speak. They always hit their little speed bump right around finals almost every single year. You want to play them right then. The run production tells me that we have our work cut out for us to keep their run production down. Stanford looks like a team on paper that we have to score runs against to win."

JJ Altobelli

"We want to play against the best. We'd rather play against the UCLA's and Stanford's because you see who you are as a team. It's going to be fun, it's the Pac-12 and hopefully it'll be good."

"We just need to put everything together, pitch good, hit good and play good defense. Just have our mentaility back and not let who we're playing affect how we play."

Cole Irvin

"We've got to attack them with inside pitches. I don't feel like other pitchers have been attacking them like they should."

"I just need to pitch to contact. Our defense is going to be there and our offense shows up or it doesn't show up. I just need to throw strikes and do my job."

"I want the W, but I want the team W. It's not just for me."