What New Miami Baseball Head Coach J.D. Arteaga Said In His First Media Interviews Ahead of 2024 Season
Every year at the end of January, Miami Hurricanes baseball media day gives Hurricanes fans a taste of what the upcoming season will be like.
This season, there is no difference as there are many takeaways to note following Miami’s head coach J.D. Arteaga 13 minutes at the mic and interviewing some of the players, old and new, on the team.
Here is what he had to say to the Miami Hurricanes media looking ahead to 2024:
Opening statement:
“First official practice, so it’s an exciting time. It’s basically our spring training so. You guys stick around, it’s a lot of new faces? But a couple of familiar faces coming back, you know, like Carlos Perez and Blake Cyr and [Edgardo] Villegas in the outfield, but all in all, it’s a lot of new faces, but it’s an exciting team. I think so many positions are wide open right now when you lose a guy like Yoyo Morales. You lose [C.J.] Kayfus, and you lose shortstop, your right fielder, closer, two set-up guys, a couple starters. It’s a lot of open spots, so it just creates a lot of competition. So our practices are really game-like, game speed. I tell the guys, the scoreboard’s on every day, not on game day but on practice days as well. So when they are competing for a job and playing time. Just it’s an exciting time. An exciting time from now until February 16th, when we throw out our first starting lineup. Guarantee it won’t be the same starting lineup when we go out there on the last day in Omaha. It will be the first starting lineup, so it’s an exciting time right now.”
On being the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes:
“It’s exciting. It’s an honor number one. It’s exciting. It’s a blessing to get the opportunity to lead a program that I grew up watching, following, and playing forward so that I went to the most important community that I grew up in. It’s made me who I am. I’m blessed for this opportunity, and there’s nothing that I want more than to give back to the community, the school, a championship, and everything they’ve given me.”
On the adjustment from pitching coach to head coach:
“The first day I stayed in my old office. I did my first interview in my old office. It took a while. I tell people I walked in, turned right for 21 years. It took about a week, a week and a half to start going left. All in all, it’s the same program. It’s still baseball. Still work with pitchers and hitters, and I did a little bit of that as the pitching coach. I dabbled here and there in all aspects of the program. And I learned under Jim Morris and Gino DiMare. They let me do my job, and as their assistant head coach, I was involved in a lot of the decision-making; a lot of things ran through me. So I had a feel for a lot of the off field things. So I feel comfortable, and I’m ready to go and take a crack at it.”
On what his team is:
“I think we have a lot of options offensively, right? We got a lot of players that can play multiple positions. Players that can hit anywhere in the lineup. We don’t have that star in the lineup like a YoYo Morales or a C.J. Kayfus. But we do have guys, I promise you, in two or three years, that are going to be superstars, you know? So again, it’s exciting times, and watching those guys grow and develop and get better, not just as baseball players but human beings, it’s really the most rewarding part of this whole thing. Watching these kids grow and get better in all aspects of life. So, it’s just a great time. Great time of the year.”
On handling a variety of different tasks as the head coach:
“That’s the problem. A million ideas and a million options and tons of combinations of what we can do. So you know, ultimately, it’s about putting the best nine guys out there that give us the best chance to win. And you know, Friday night might be one lineup, Saturday different lineup, Sunday…it all depends on how guys are going. Look, I got a lot of help. I love the staff that we put together, and the administration has allowed me to put together, right, financially, and everything else, so. I feel great about the guys I surrounded myself with. A lot of, you know, experience, whether it’s 19 years of head coaching in college baseball in [Rob] Cooper. Darren Fenster that’s been in pro ball for 12 years. He’s done everything from head coach to hitting coach to infield coordinator, base-running coordinator, all those things. Got Laz Gutierrez, that’s been in a big league dugout for seven years and was a big part of the Red Sox success and the World Series runs there. I got a lot of support and guys I can bounce ideas off of to put together the best lineup possible.”
On what the biggest question mark of the team:
“The biggest question mark right now is the bullpen. The obvious is that Andrew Walters is not with us anymore. But losing a guy like [Alejandro] Torres, [Carlos] Lequerica, those guys were really valuable innings. They were important pieces to get the ball to Walters in the eighth or ninth inning, whatever it may be. It’s by far the biggest question mark. When we decided to move [Carson] Palmquist to the rotation, we had Walters there, and we thought he was possibly a good closer. I never knew he was going to be who he was, with the years that he had. So there’s always someone who’s going to step up and take control of that role, and it’s up to them. All you can ask for in life is opportunities and there’s plenty of those right now in our roster and as far as different roles are concerned.”
On what the team’s strength is:
“Strengths I would say our starting pitching right now, you know? Anytime you get your Friday night starter back like a Gage Ziehl, it’s very important. It’s a huge key to your success, right? And we got Rafe Schlesinger coming back; as the year went on last year, he got better and better and better, and he topped out in that last game, in his last game against Texas, when he went seven scoreless. You have two guys like that, and you bring some older guys. Harry Hernandez from Miami-Dade has some experience being the number one guy. To me, being the number one guy, whether it’s junior college, division-1, whatever it is, it’s a different pressure, a different weight that you carry. So he’s got that experience of being that Friday night guy at the junior college level. To me, that experience of being the one guy carries a lot of weight, you know, so. Same thing with a Drew Dwyer coming in from Lynn as a 24-year-old, seventh year in college. I guess with our standards here with football, nine years is not that big of a deal. That guy has been the front man for Lynn University again I don’t care what level you’re at, when you’re the first game of any series, a lot of weight is on your shoulders. The experience of carrying that weight and dealing with it, it goes a long way.”
On the young players he’s most excited about:
“I think our freshman class, especially on the offensive side, is very exciting. So Daniel Cuvet, is going to play somewhere in the corner of the infield. I was telling somebody just watching BP yesterday, I don’t remember a freshman with more power than Daniel. Just in Bp. The ability to hit the ball as far and as hard as he does. I’ve been around for a long time. I played with Pat Burrell as a freshman, and we had Yonder Alonso and YoYo Morales. Big power guys. But as a freshman coming in, I don’t remember too many guys with the power that Cuvet has. Antonio Jimenez, which is a shortstop, he makes plays on the defense that no one else on the roster can make. He’s a freshman so there’s a learning curve. Jake Kulikowski in the outfield, to me will be a special bat at one point. The future is bright there. We don’t have those household names yet, but be prepared for some of these guys in the near future.”
On being the head coach at Miami:
“It is something that I thought about but hasn’t really sunk in yet. It’s a dream come true, and I can’t go back…I can’t explain the opportunity that I’m blessed for. I think that first game and you do a lineup change for the first time is going to be a big deal, you know. I’m excited. I can’t wait for it to happen.”
On if there are any injuries going into the season:
“No injuries. Actually getting three guys back we lost last year. [Myles] Caba’s coming back. Caba and [Ashton] Crowther both coming back and they’re ready to go. From day one, they’ve been cleared by doctors. They’re in the intrasquad like everybody else. And then you got Brian Walters, which is about two weeks behind those guys. So I think the first time you’ll see action in the game is that third week, which you know Florida. With those guys, you are going to be careful and be cautious about how often you use them; not so much, you know, when you use them, but they throw on a Friday to shut down for the rest of the weekend, so. You got to be smart and choose when and where those guys are. All three of those guys are going to be important parts of our bullpen and our rotation, possibly.”
On any changes to the structure of the program:
“ Structure-wise, we tweaked a few things here or there. We’ve had a lot of success for a long time. We’re not going to change a whole lot of things. That’s not to say that we haven’t changed a few things, but all the things that we start every day, we start every practice with base running. That is something that is so important: scoring runs. And you can’t, you can’t get too caught up on batting average, home runs and… at the end of the day who scores the most runs is going to win the game. You score more runs than the other team, you’re going to win games, and base running is a way to score runs where it doesn’t take a swing of the bat or a bunt or anything. It’s taking extra bases and putting pressure on defenses where they make mistakes. Darren’s done a great job. We preach that something’s important, and we show them by doing it first every day. That’s the very first thing that we do. Before we throw a baseball, do anything else, we go out there and do base running for ten, fifteen minutes every single day. So that’s a change we haven’t done in the past. Other than that, baseball is baseball. We’re not groundbreaking things here, but we have tweaked a few things here and there, especially in the analytic world. Going back to our administration, they’ve allowed me to hire two guys that are just in charge of analytics. It’s a language that I understand a little bit of it, but these two guys are a different spectrum of the game. They’ve helped out a lot as well.”
On how analytics will help:
“There’s two aspects of it. Part of it is player development and making our guys better with the whole measuring of the Kinatrax system. I think we are one of five schools in the country with the Kinatrax system, which is a markless motion capture system to track, man. We had all these things; we just didn’t have a department to run it. I mean I was in charge of running the pitching side of it and that is a totally different language. Now we got two guys, that one, is really focused on our player development. The other is focused on our advanced scouting, so to speak. He’s always been working a couple weeks ahead of us, so when we’re playing Notre Dame this week, he’s working on Louisville that we’ll play two weeks from now. When we come into the office on Tuesday morning, after a Monday off day, our script is set, we got tendencies. We got everything we need to prepare for them. Where in the past when myself was doing or the hitting coach or whoever it was, by the time we got done with it, it was like Thursday night. So we already done our preparation, now we got to get ready to play the next day and we learned something we didn’t prepare for. This is a big part of the preparation, getting us ready for whoever we’re playing.”
On the pressure that comes with being the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes baseball team:
“If you’ve ever worn a Hurricane uniform, whether you a player, starter, backup, or pitching coach? The pressures there. There’s expectations here that are nowhere else in the country. That was a question that was asked of me plenty when I was going through the interview process. Is there any second thoughts, or is there any reason why you why you wouldn’t take a job? Of course my answer was always no. In my last meeting, I asked what it could possibly be, and they mentioned the pressure or the expectations. This is what I love about it. I’m part of what created it as a player, going four years in a row to the College World Series. Not winning any, but its part of..I get it; the biggest part to me, what attracted me to this place as a player coming up when I was eighteen, to a coach, to now a head coach, it’s what I love most. Without expectations, what are we doing it for? Those expectations are never going to change. Regardless of what our results are this year, or what they were last year, our expectations going into every season is putting up another year up on that scoreboard. We don’t glorify or celebrate our regional appearances or super-regionals. The only dates that you see there are the four dates we won a national championship. That’s not going to change. That’s the only thing that matters around here. That’s our job every year.”
On what he wants fans to know about this version of the Miami Hurricanes:
“They are going to get the best version of us every night. I get it. Some days, we’ll fall short. But it won’t be because of our doing. We get outplayed, we get beat, that’s going to happen, but I’m going to do my part and my best to put a team out there that’s not going to beat themselves. You’re going to have to beat us, and you are going to have to get all 27 outs. Regardless of what the score is, regardless of the outcome is, you’re going to get the best version of us. Coaches, staff, players, everybody that’s wearing our uniform, you’re going to get the best version.” Courtesy of CanesCounty
Trinton is the owner of CanesToday. He writes for all sports, with a focus on football and recruiting, he is a freshman in high school and wants to graduate from the University of Miami
