Flagstaff opens rebuilding campaign with a .500 start

During his monthly sit down with member of the local press corps, Flagstaff Outlaws GM Greg Newgard took some time to reflect on his teams 14-14 start.

“Our goal this year was to sit in the 80-85 win range, so a .500 start certainly puts us in range of that,” Newgard told the assembled reporters. “We got series wins against a tough Akron squad as well as those guys from Kansas City. We got a good split against Bear Country. Lost to Los Altos, but it was a better than expected series that could have turned out differently with a break of two. Lots of positives to build on.”

But when asked about the series losses to North Carolina and South Loop, Newgard shrugged. “We left some games on the table there. We know North Carolina isn’t that good of a team, but we caught them at the wrong time and that’s just baseball. We could have easily been in the 16- to 17-win range with those other series.”

The discussion next move to the team performance and the slow start the offense seemed to have.

“Yep, the hitting certainly underperformed a bit,” Newgard said. “I think we hit like .215 as a team. That’s not going to get it done. Part of it can probably be related to have a road-heavy starting schedule as well as the cold weather here at home. As you remember, the bats started cold last year too and see where it ended up, so we’ll have faith that things rebound in the upcoming months.”

Later, the talk turned to pitching and Newgard perked up a bit.

“We’ve got an interesting experiment working here,” Newgard said. “We know we’re going to have use 9 or 10 guys as starters this season based on the fact that we purposely did not try and sign and horses in the rotation during what we knew would be a rebuilding year.

“So we sat down with the pitching coaches and mapped some strategy out on how to deploy these guys. Right now, the first month is under our belt and most everything went as planned. The bullpen was a little overused, but we knew we needed to add another arm or two there as the season drags on.”

As is customary within the Flagstaff franchise, during these regular monthly press sessions, the Outlaws announced their hitter and pitcher of the month.

“We awarded Goldy with the hitter of the month award,” Newgard smiled. “He nearly hit .300 with an OPS over .950. He had 10 extra base hits, 22 walks to 23 strikeouts. He really paced the offense as best he could. He just needs some support from the rest of the lineup.”

“We had a few good candidates for pitcher, but went with rookie Fernando Romero in his first month of work. He went 3-1 with and ERA of 3.07. He kept his runners per 9 at 10.0 and had a solid strikeout rate. He’s only got a handful of starts left for us, so we’ll see if he can maintain that pace.”