College Baseball : Las Vegas Gets Only One Homer, but 15 Other Hits Nearly as Damaging to UCI

Mike Gerakos, UC Irvine’s baseball coach, didn’t figure his pitching staff--with a combined earned-run average of 6.15--would be able to contain big hitting Nevada Las Vegas.

You don’t have to be a coach to realize what the Rebels do best. Even the student doing the play-by-play on the UNLV campus radio station knew that.

“When they hit home runs, they’re going to get a victory mark in the column with the big W for win,” he said over the airwaves.

OK. So it was redundant. It also was true.

Coming into Sunday’s game the Rebels had hit 61 home runs--fifth in the nation--five coming during their doubleheader sweep of the Anteaters on Saturday.

“I guess you’d call our offense wide open,” said Fred Dallimore, the Rebels’ coach. “We don’t bother too much with bunts and little stuff like that. We have five or six guys in the lineup who can hit the ball out.”

Three Irvine pitchers did, to a great extent, manage to keep the ball in the confines of Anteater Stadium. The Rebels hit but one homer on Sunday. However, UNLV did get 16 hits, including four doubles, to gain a 10-5 victory that put it in sole possession of second place in the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.’s South Division three games behind Cal State Fullerton (12-5).

The Anteaters (6-8 in the PCAA, 18-20 overall) are third in the four-team division and fading fast.

“I’d say we’ve dug ourselves a big hole but we’re still breathing,” Gerakos said. “We’ve got about 10 games coming up with teams in our division so we could make a move. We’re down but not out.”

Gerakos had hoped for an attack that could keep pace with Las Vegas (9-8, 28-14). And it did for the first three innings. After Las Vegas had taken the lead with on Mike Oglesbee’s two-out RBI single in the first inning, Anteater right fielder Paul Hammond hit his third home run of the season over the left-field wall to even the score.

Las Vegas regained the lead in the fourth when right fielder Jordan Stevens hit his fifth home run of the season. In the next inning the Rebels seemed to put the game out of reach as they scored three runs on designated hitter Brian Whitaker’s bases-loaded double. Leading 5-1 and freshman pitcher Scott Lewis allowing Irvine just two hits through four innings, things looked pretty safe for the Rebels.

But Irvine struck back for three runs in the fifth on four hits. Though it was a big inning for the Anteaters, it could have been produced more runs.

After Anteater designated hitter Mike Fay doubled to open the inning, catcher Steve Morgan followed with a single. Fay scored when Lewis attempted to start a double play after fielding a soft grounder by first baseman Bob Perry but instead shot putted the ball into center field.

Things looked great for Irvine with runners on first and second and nobody out. That is until Ed Clark failed to lay down a bunt with the runners on the move. Morgan was picked off at third and seconds later Clark grounded out to the third.

What made things worse was that the next batter, left fielder Tom Bain, singled but had only one runner to drive in. Mike Sugar brought Bain around to score with a double but was picked off between second and third with some careless baserunning.

“We just couldn’t seem to get on track offensively,” Gerakos said.

Las Vegas scored once in the sixth, once in the seventh and three times in the eighth. The big blow in the eighth was Oglesbee’s two-run double that gave him four RBIs for the game and eight for the three-game series.

Oglesbee, college baseball’s leading home run hitter with 18, has 73 RBIs.

Lewis (4-0) was the winning pitcher. Reliever Scott Hormann got his second save. Robbie Johnson (3-2) took the loss.