RedHawks Manager talks about the season so far

Fargo, ND (WDAY Sports) - The red hot RedHawks are back in town tonight. Thanks to a 42-and-19 stretch and current 9-game winning streak, the hawks are in first place for the first time since week one.

It's also the first time we've heard from Manager Doug Simunic since his on field skirmish with a Winnipeg coach. Four days, and a bunch of publicity later, I asked him about the incident.

“It's gotten a lot of publicity, a lot of airtime, more than I want, but I was just defending myself and what I thought was the right thing to do. I had somebody who had some motive to get up in my face and was pushing on me, so I cracked him a couple times, so that's where it is now. If I had to do it again, I probably wouldn't want to do it, but it happened, it was inside the white lines and I’ll just leave it at that.”

An 8-15 start, as many as 10 games back this year. Did you ever think you'd see first place again?

“It’s a long season. You just gotta keep playing the schedule that's presented to you. I thought there was a chance we could be a pretty good team but you have to let it mature. Sometimes they take a little longer to mature than other times. This case, it was a little later. New players, new guys coming in, we didn't have Ruben, made a couple of adjustments. Now we're able to do the things we're capable of doing.”

Would you rather finish this season as the champs and have that extra pressure and expectation in the playoffs, or would you rather finish 2nd or 3rd and kind of go under the radar?

“I like the 2nd part of that, but I know the organization would like the first part of that. I'm going to try to win to every game. I've got 7 here and 4 on the road, 11, and we gotta win 10 to reach the 60 win mark. That's always a benchmark here. It'll be tough to do. I don't know; let's see how many wins we can get, 60 would be a good goal.”

The Hawks begin their final regular season home stand of the year tonight against 2nd place Gary.

Tags: trevor peterson, redhawks, sports, baseball, fargo