Oregon baseball head coach George Horton spoke to the media Monday about Oregon’s season opener against Hawaii beginning on Friday at 8:35 p.m. PST in Honolulu, Hawaii.
What are you looking forward to seeing in Hawaii?
Diamond Head, pinapples… I don’t golf. I don’t have any real hobbies outside of my family and baseball. I fish, sometimes. But I am so bad at golf. I’m not really good at fishing either, but I’m good at trying to fish.
Do you feel your team is where you want them to be?
No. I don’t know if anybody in the country, unless they have all their personnel back from the year before and is going, “oh, we’re ready,” is in midseason form. The other side of that is do you want to be in midseason form? That means you’re not getting better. There’re some question marks in youth and inexperience, and yea we would have liked another month of practice in great weather. The NCAA doesn’t allow any of us to do that.
You have a better idea of the starting rotation at this point?
We’re going to start Cole Irvin on Friday, David Peterson on Saturday, Trent Paddon on Sunday and Jack Karraker on Monday.
Do you look at Peterson, Karraker and Paddon as the leading candidates to be in that rotation as you go through?
Yeah. Not every weekend is going to be a four-game series, we have those back-to-back. The weekends you have a three-game series you typically have a midweek game. Once Cole gets back, if he gets back, and now he can chew up some innings as a normal starter, one of those guys would strengthen our bullpen.
The guys from Seminole State College – Brandon Cuddy and Phil Craig-St. Louis – what kind of impact can they have on your team?
Those three guys, the two Seminole kids and (Matt) Eureste, are in the starting lineup. And late in the summer, kudos to coach (Wasikowski), we thought we might need some corner, left-handed bats. That was a guess based on the draft and returners. The best way to say it is that we need more hitters like Shaun Chase and Mitchell Tolman in our opinion, and those three guys have been tremendous.
How’s the center field competition going between Austin Grebeck and Nick Catalano?
Catalano will get the first crack at it. Grebeck has struggled, unfortunately. He’s got the potential to be a complete baseball player but, speaking for the offensive coaches, he hasn’t showed consistently the excellence we think he’s capable of. So (Scott) Heineman is back in the mix (for center field). Heineman will be our starting right fielder, (Steven) Packard will be our left fielder.
Did you see that the 2015 Pac-12 Preseason Poll picked Oregon second?
Yea, I talked about that at Oregon club. Those are educated guesses and I would say that is a poll that probably matters because they know our personnel, but I don’t think any of us coaches put a whole lot into the coaches poll or any other poll. You have to go out and earn it on the field.
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