@MizzouBaseball Media Day - Head Coach Steve Bieser Quotes
2/13/2017 5:29:00 PM | Baseball
Mizzou's Bieser, Houck and Bond met the media Monday to preview the season
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Mizzou Baseball is set to open its 2017 season this Friday against Eastern Michigan in Fort Myers, Fla. First-year head coach Steve Bieser met with the media Monday to preview the weekend and the season. Below are quotes from his press conference.
Head Coach Steve Bieser
Opening statement…
"First of all guys, I'm just really excited to be here, excited for game week. This is something that's a new era and we have a new group of guys that have worked really hard. And it's game week, we can't be more excited than we are right now. I think that goes for every player on the roster. We're ready to get started down in Florida and we have an opponent in Eastern Michigan that we're excited to go play."
Bieser: It's game week. We can't be more excited than we are right now. #MIZ #C2E ???
— #MizzouBaseball (@MizzouBaseball) February 13, 2017
On what he's learned about his team…
"The thing I've been most impressed with is that every single guy on this team has bought into the process. And that's what we're looking for. We have a process that we feel like has been very successful in the past, in past places we've been as a coaching staff, and guys are buying into the standards and expectations that we are asking from every player. I'm really excited to see how this translates to game play."
On the hype around Tanner Houck…
"Tanner has been outstanding with all of the hype that is there. Tanner has been all business right now. He wants to be the first pick in the draft right now. But we've talked about how you can't control whether you're the first pick or the 10th pick, it's the organizations who decide what they need. I think he's able to put all of that past him and he's able to go out and do his job every single day and that's what we expect from Tanner."
.@houck_tanner is a popular guy at media day.#MIZ #C2E ??? pic.twitter.com/nGEIboI42M
— #MizzouBaseball (@MizzouBaseball) February 13, 2017
On being picked to finish at the bottom of the SEC...
"It really doesn't mean anything to me. I've been at Southeast Missouri State and the first year there we were picked to finish down in the bottom of the standings and we did really well. We were picked three years to finish first and we were able to do that. The preseason rankings mean nothing to me; it's where we are going to be at postseason and I think the best thing to be in this situation right now is to allow people to expect nothing from this club and I think we can surprise some people."
On rebuilding the defense …
"That's been a priority for us. We have a lot of sinkerball pitchers and ground ball pitchers and that was a priority for us in the fall, to make sure we cleaned up our defense. We have high expectations on defense. We've put numbers on what we want our fielding percentage to be but really we want to make every play that should be made and really be good at the routine play. We spent an entire fall; we really didn't get into offense until early spring. We've been really focused on defense; we expect to play good defense. And we expect pitchers to throw strikes and to be able to defend. And the offense has come along really well in the last few weeks so I'm really pleased with both sides of the ball."
On expectations for the first few series…
"The biggest thing for me is just playing up to our ability level, the standards we have set. We want to see a lot of energy and a lot of excitement. It's really not about the wins and losses, it's about the process and doing the things we expect our players to do day in and day out. It's being at their best every single day, and if they can do those things the wins and losses take care of themselves."
On players embracing new technology used in practices…
"I think they've done a great job with the pitch recognition and all of the technology we're throwing at them. And we're continuing to do more and more with it. But really what we're doing is giving them a basis of where they're at right now and then giving them an opportunity to improve. They understand technology very well. They get into it and are excited about it. They can see improvements being made. We're not so much about being results-oriented, it's about the process being right. There's really some guys doing a great job with the process. We can give them positive feedback; they might be 0-for-4, but we can give them positive feedback on if they're making the right decisions and swinging at the right pitches. They may have lined out a couple of times and didn't get any hits so it's rewarding for players to know that the process is right and we know that over the course of 56 games if the process is right then that the end result at the end of the season is where we want them to be."
On roles in the rotation and the bullpen…
"The roles are pretty well defined early on. We've spent the last six months seeing where everyone's at and defining who's going to be in the bullpen and who's going to be in the starting rotation. And the good thing is sometimes you have to worry about who's Friday night and we know who's Friday night. So we can get past Friday night and look at Saturday and Sunday and see how everything fits together there. But we've defined the first weekend and they'll know after practice today. We're going to go Andy Toelken and Michael Plassmeyer in games two and three and game four is wide open. Really how we're going to match it up in week one is we have seven guys who have fought really hard for the starting spots. All seven guys will get multiple innings in four games. We'll matchup two guys in and say here's your game, go get your game. And we'll make a determination once we see them against other competition. It's sometimes hard to read when they're against your own players. We want to see them against other competition. But Sunday is wide open. When you look at it: Cole Bartlett is our No. 2 guy right now. We're going to use him in some situations when we want to win ballgames. So if we have to use him earlier in the weekend we will but if not he'll be a starter later, towards Sunday."
Bieser: We need to play up to our ability level and the standards that we have set. #MIZ #C2E ???
— #MizzouBaseball (@MizzouBaseball) February 13, 2017
On Bryce Montes De Oca's comeback from injury…
"Bryce has been outstanding. His last outing, just this Sunday he threw the ball better than he ever has. I'm very intrigued by that. The plan is to see where we might be able to use him on Saturday in a relief role. We definitely want to see him pitch multiple innings. Our starters, we're looking to get five innings, if we could get six that would be great. That means somebody has to throw three or four innings and I see Bryce coming in and throwing three or four innings in one of those games. If not on Saturday there's a chance he'll start on Sunday."
On limiting Tanner Houck's pitch count…
"Yeah, I think I limit all of our pitchers early on. I mean, you're more cautious early in the season. But the one thing we've been able to do with Tanner [Houck] is build his pitch count better than anybody else because Tanner took the Fall off. We've been able to start a little bit earlier with Tanner and allow him to get his pitch limit up a little bit higher. All of our guys should be right around that sixth inning plateau with about 90 pitches, and that's all seven guys we've been building that way. One thing we want with Tanner is to be able to throw 90 pitches and get six innings, not throw 90 pitches and be in four or five innings. That's something coach [Patrick] Hallmark has done an outstanding job with, getting our pitchers to compete in the strike zone, to induce early contact, get the ball in play and let our defense do the work."
On preparing for live game action…
"The hard thing is to get the excitement out of there and make sure that we continue. We still have several days that we have a lot of work to do. A lot of it, when we get to game week, and every coach is different, but our game week is we start preparing for the opponent. We don't have a midweek game so we have extra days to prepare for Eastern Michigan. We start seeing video, we start putting the plans out there and executing them. I don't want our guys to look past what we have to do today at practice. That's something that we're kind of trying to get that mentality that we've got to take care of the game in hand first, the one that we're focused on right now is Friday night and making sure that our guys are ready for Friday night. We have a work week planned already for them to really get after it this week."
Bieser: We aren't so much focused on being results-oriented but rather on the process being right.#MIZ #C2E ???
— #MizzouBaseball (@MizzouBaseball) February 13, 2017
On the team's offensive potential this season…
"I think the potential is that we can be a very creative offense. Our goal, like I said, it's really not saying 'We're going to hit .270' or 'We're going to hit .280', it's more like 'How do we score six runs a game?' and being able to produce runs. I think that's something that they understand that better. They know that it's a process throughout our entire lineup. I think what you'll see is you'll see guys making better pitch decisions. You'll see pitchers' pitch counts going up much quicker, and not necessarily that in the SEC you want to get in the bullpen because sometimes when you get to the bullpen it's worse, so it's more about attacking and hitting pitches that we can do damage with and be good early. So I would say that I think we'll see an offense that–you know, one thing that we're trying to get away from is, we don't want nine hitters in our lineup. We want an offense. We want everybody working for the same goal, so that's really the mentality for this team that we work as an offense. We practice everyday. We practice ways to score runs whenever we can't actually hit those types of runs, so we've got to find ways to manufacture runs. We've got to be creative with offense and we've got to be able to steal bases. We've got to be able to be, we've got to be a complete offense and be able to do all of those things. That's something we've spent the last three weeks really focusing on."
On potentially recruiting from Chicago…
"A lot of the schedule is already predetermined. I mean, in college baseball we'll schedule three years out, so coming in in July and trying to totally change the schedule is not a smart thing to do because it's just hard to pick up games. People are already set in there. We're playing the schedule that was given to us. We didn't make any adjustments to it whatsoever. But with that being said, I think that that's an area that we can be pretty good, in the Chicago area. There's a lot of good players there. We want to be good in the Midwest, so I think that's a positive for us to have those guys on our schedule and I'm sure that there was a reason why that was the schedule that's in place."
On how Lance Rhodes' Chicago ties help in recruiting players from the Chicago area…
"Yeah, that really helps. Really, we've got a lot of good ties because Coach [Patrick] Hallmark has got the Texas ties and we've got all the same people that we used when we were at Southeast, out in the West Coast, and a little bit in Florida, a little bit here and there, but having that variety of guys that can go out and recruit any area, that's what we need to be able to do. We know that we've got to be really good in-state and if we can do our job in-state and pick up those guys from the other areas then we'll be in good shape."
On if pitch recognition strategy changes heading into live action games…
"No, it doesn't, and a lot of times what we see is we've trained so hard on what the strike zone is. I mean, we know the strike zone, every hitter on the roster knows his strike zone. We see sometimes a little passive approach because we're trained so well in the strike zone, and we all know based on umpires that a strike could be, we call it ball eight or ball zero. I mean, some of them will call a ball or so off the plate, we've got to be able to adjust to that in game situations, but I think that our guys definitely know the strike zone and we continue to teach the strike zone to them. So sometimes we see ourselves start a little slow offensively, but the big picture is we know where the past three years we've started slow but we're playing our best and hitting our best in the last part of the season because we start seeing everything kind of fine-tune, and understand that, you know, what is a strike. And I think that we have the luxury, I think that we're in the best league and we've got the best umpires in college baseball as well, so now the strike zone is a strike zone, more so than what we may have been used to."
Bieser: We don't want nine hitters in our lineup. We want a complete offense with everyone working toward the same goal.#MIZ #C2E ???
— #MizzouBaseball (@MizzouBaseball) February 13, 2017
On if the learning curve is longer with a new team…
"I think the biggest thing is the buy in. There's a lot of, there has to be a lot of buy in for the learning curve to be accelerated. I would say in year one, we had pretty good buy in because we had a young club there at Southeast and we had good buy in. Year two we had unbelievable buy in because everybody that bought in in year one had the best years of their career. We'll see how these guys have responded to the buy in. The buy in is super, super right now, but the first time you go out and you go 0-for-4, or you go 0-for-8, all the sudden you don't get off to a good start, we'll see how guys react to that. I've been pleased with our buy in. If the buy in stays at 100 percent, you'll see, we'll see an offensive increase in everything that we do on the offensive side."
On the learning curve for the pitchers…
"I think for us, and not really sure what the philosophy was before I was here, but this has been a strong pitching university. Great pitchers and a really strong tradition of pitchers. What we want to do is we want to challenge hitters. We know how hard it is to get hits. If we can play defense like we think we can play defense and we can throw strikes early in the count, we want to produce early contact and play great defense. We know that all the numbers say the more pitches that a hitter sees per at-bat, the better his chances go up with slugging, the better his chances go up with hitting. Everything goes up when he starts seeing more and more pitches."
