What they said about Arizona’s Super Regional loss to Ole Miss

Arizona baseball fell behind early and never recovered Saturday as Ole Miss knotted up the Tucson Super Regional with a 12-3 win.

Our full game recap can be found here and below are some notable quotes from postgame interviews.

Arizona coach Jay Johnson on starter Garrett Irvin’s performance: “I think he just missed up and over the plate against a really good offensive team. Those guys hit a lot of balls hard. Extra base hits, they’re balanced, just got a lot of the plate, and got a lot of balls up in the zone and they hit them.”

Johnson on the offense’s early struggles against Ole Miss starter Doug Nikhazy: “I look at it two ways: I think the positives were we had him at 60 pitches through two innings and then the inning got away from us and we were down seven to nothing. So that kind of took the effectiveness of what we were doing and at that point away, I felt like. So some of the strikeouts weren’t bad strikeouts. He made pitches, we pushed him to the limit and then a couple innings we started to expand the zone. Deception is the name of his game, there’s no question about that. So tip your hat to him. We see why he’s an All-American.”

Arizona first baseman Branden Boissiere on what made Nikhazy effective: “He just filled up the zone really well tonight. He was aggressive in every count and he was throwing his offspeed pitches for strikes on every count, whether it was 3-0, 3-1 or 3-2. So I think that kind of kept us off balance a little bit tonight.”

Boissiere on what positives can be taken from the loss: “Just sticking with it. Sometimes when a game gets out of hand like that, 12-3, then guys start to take ABs off or the dugout gets a little bit quiet, so just sticking with it and trusting that we’re really good baseball players. We can always put up a nine run inning you never know when it’s gonna happen.”

Johnson on what he told the team after the game: “It has zero relevance on tomorrow’s outcome unless you let it. If we had one game to play on our field with this team to go to the College World Series, we’d take it 1,000 times out of 1,000, so we feel good about it.”

Boissiere on playing a winner-take-all game in front of a packed Hi Corbett crowd Sunday: “Now that we’re here and we have almost full capacity fans in the stands, it’s pretty awesome to have them all behind us. Ole Miss also has a lot of fans in there so it’s cool for them, but for us it just really gets us going and gets us into the game, gets us motivated to play and win for them.”

Johnson on if Arizona has a pitching plan for Sunday: “Yes we do.”

Johnson on if he wants to announce it: “Nope.”