Behind Enemy Lines with Princeton baseball coach Scott Bradley

Penn baseball is halfway through a series with Princeton, as the Quakers look to stay atop the Ivy League standings. Here is our interview with Princeton coach Scott Bradley before the series began.

Daily Pennsylvanian: Your team is pretty young, and although it got off to a 4-0 start in ivy play, it was swept in its next two series. Can you talk about what factored in most to that rough stretch and what you have tried to take away from it?

Scott Bradley: Going into the year, we knew we were going to be very young. In fact, there are a lot of games where we’ll have six or seven freshmen on the field at one time.

With the Ivy weekends, they’re always so different. A lot of it is just circumstances. We caught Dartmouth coming right after their trip where they were a little banged up. And we’re the same way now. We’re so young. We’re so inexperienced. We’ve had a good number of injuries. For the freshmen, in their first time, people don’t understand what it’s like to play a doubleheader every Saturday and a doubleheader every Sunday.

You’re on the field at 9:00 every morning [and] you get off the field at 6:00 after games. It’s tough for the young kids to really get a real feel for that before they do it for the first time and I think it has kind of caught up to us a little bit in the last couple weekends.

DP: What is that transition like from the high school baseball schedule to getting adjusting to college at an Ivy League school and then also playing those doubleheaders every weekend?

SB: It is difficult. Like I said, you almost have to go through it to see what it’s like. You start off and everyone is so excited about getting off and going on the spring trip and getting going, but then all of a sudden, the semester starts getting to you and there is a lot going on in their lives. All of a sudden, every weekend is just packed with baseball from morning until night. It takes some experience to figure it out.

Normally when you go into the Ivy League weekends, you feel like you can keep yourself in a race, at least until the end, as long as you can avoid a really bad weekend, an 0-4 weekend, and we had one last weekend. We just got beat up a little bit. With the weather that we had, we were forced to play a doubleheader Wednesday against Harvard. So we’re looking at a doubleheader Saturday, a doubleheader Sunday, we had to have a doubleheader on Wednesday against Harvard and now we play [Penn] in a doubleheader Saturday, doubleheader Sunday.

It’s tough. It’s a grind and it makes it tough on your pitching but it is what it is so you just try to get your guys to focus on coming out to the ballpark every day and enjoy their time, try to convince them that the time they spend at the ballpark is their reward for everything that they have to go through academically.

We try to make it enjoyable for them, as much as we can. We always try to come out with the idea that you’re gonna get better today. You’re gonna enjoy yourself, you’re going to get better and you’re gonna go compete. And that’s what we hope to do this weekend.

DP: With those young guys, which freshmen have stood out to you? Which have you seen the most promise from?

SB: It’s been different. We had a stretch where early in the year, Nick Hernandez and Danny Baer and Paul Tupper all got off to really good starts. Sometimes that happens. There were no expectations at the start of the year. They all went out and they got off to really good starts.

And then you go back and you get started with the league and they put a little more expectations on themselves. Danny Baer ran into a fence at Duke so he’s been playing on a regular basis, but he’s been banged up. Nick Hernandez has just kind of all of a sudden, as hot as he was early has kind of cooled off. On the other side, Zack Belski got off to a slower start than the other guys and has probably been our best hitter of the freshman group over the course of the last three weeks.

Chad Powers and Keelan Smithers, who will both pitch for us [Saturday], have had really good days and then will have days when they look like freshmen. But that is kind of where we are. You’ll see, Baer and Tupper and Belski and Hernandez will be in the majority of games we play, and Powers will start game one [vs. Penn] and Smithers will pitch game two, so we’ll be running some young guys out there. That’s for sure.

DP: With Penn having a stellar year, Columbia playing at a championship level, and Cornell playing solid ball, can you talk about the depth of the Gehrig division this year?

SB: It’s interesting because we used to talk when I first came into the league – I’ve been here 17 years – it was the opposite where the other side was very very good and all the teams we’re battling right down to the end. About four-five years ago, it started to switch over. I think when you see it this year, there are some really good teams.

I think, in the league in general, there is such a fine line. So many of these games that everybody plays come down to getting a two-out hit, getting a big two-out stop and that’s just how the Ivy League games are. We play a seven-inning game in the first game of the doubleheader that go by really quick. We’ve all played in some bad weather this year so it will be fun this weekend to play on a nice dry field. But these games come down to who plays with two outs the best.

From following Penn the way that I have, they just have a belief in themselves and it looks like they’re really enjoying themselves and having a lot of fun playing. We just played Columbia last weekend and Columbia is very very good. We hope to throw a monkey wrench into everything that has gone on but I would think that series next week between Penn and Columbia is going to be some kind of battle right down to the end.

DP: What have you seen from Penn this season that has stood out?

SB: The big thing is, for the most part, they have a bunch of guys who have been through this before. [John Yurkow] seems to have done a great job with them. Sometimes, when you have a new coach, it’s kind of a different feel. They have a lot of guys who we felt that even going into last year we’re a talented group and just hadn’t put it together.

We always say that in the Ivy League, it’s not like you have to build something gradually. If you get just the right mix and you get that right belief and guys get off to a good starts, because the seasons lasts only five weeks, the Ivy League season is only five weekends, that if you get that belief and get off to a good start, that can carry you the entire way. Especially that belief that in the close game, we’re going to find a way to win. And there are so many close games in our league and that’s something that Penn seems to have done and it’s something that Columbia has done for the last few years.

Like I said, we’re looking forward to playing on a nice dry field on a holiday weekend. We try to tell our guys every time we come onto the field that we’re going to enjoy ourselves and we’re going to get better. We play against a good hot team this weekend so it’ll be a nice test for us.

DP: Can you talk about the performance of Michael Fagan and how you think he matches up with the Quakers lineup?

SB: Michael’s stuff is just very very good. We knew when we recruited him and it just shows [something] to a lot of the guys [since] he struggled his first three years. He tried to do too much, trying to balance everything.

Like a lot of Ivy League upperclassmen, he came in this year with the idea that he was going to really enjoy himself. He wasn’t going to worry about all the other pressures or what’s going on, he said he was going to really have fun. He got his thesis done early. He went through the interview process, he got a job early on. You kind of grow up right in front of us.

He’s very talented and you can see with his numbers and his strikeout numbers, he’s going to compete and every game he’s pitched this year has been a close game and I would expect the same thing [against Penn]. Michael has really good stuff, he has a lot of scouts watching him in that regard, but he’s pitching really well this year. He’s thrown more strikes than he has and he is really relaxed and enjoying himself, which is great to see.

DP: What’s your favorite place to eat in the Princeton area? I’m a Hoagie Haven guy myself.

SB: I think you hit it right on the head. I’m a little bit older and have a little bit more money in my pocket than most of the kids but I have three teenage kids so the amount of times that I have to bring something home from Hoagie Haven or bring something back over, I think it is a staple in most everybody’s diet around her. I do like to go to some restaurants where I can get something other than a sandwich though but Hoagie Haven is a very popular spot, that’s for sure.