SDSU Baseball Fans Love a Long Shot

It is amazing how excited the populace gets when some horse comes from last place to win the eighth race at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May.

However, Ferdinand had a cakewalk compared to the path traveled of late by San Diego State’s baseball players. Heck, he won by 2 lengths. The Aztecs don’t believe in the luxury of excesses.

These guys would go to Spyglass with one golf ball, cross the Mojave with a half canteen of water and start a game of strip poker in their shorts.

They would go through life with 10 in their checking accounts, fumes in their gas tanks and one slice of cheese in their refrigerators.

No margin of error for these guys.

Did anyone notice how the Aztecs went about winning the Western Athletic Conference Western Division championship? They won their last 15 WAC games, including four straight over the weekend from Hawaii.

These heroics gave SDSU a one-game “bulge” over the second-place Rainbows. That’s called cutting it close.

And that is also what might be called a FantAztec Finish.

If anything like this happened in the major leagues, Good Morning America would send a fleet of limousines, poets would rush to their PCs and Cooperstown would open a new exhibit. Guys like Mike Erb and Rusty Elsberry would find their faces on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Time and Rolling Stone.

Tony Kubek would have looked at the Hawaii series and said: “There is no tomorrow for these Aztecs.”

They had to win four straight in that final regular-season series. Anything less would have turned first place over to the Rainbows.

A four-game sweep was unlikely, of course, all the more so because these guys already had won 11 in a row. The nature of baseball discourages long winning streaks.

“All it takes to lose,” said Aztec Coach Jim Dietz, “is a bad hop or the wrong pitch at the wrong time.”

However, everything continued to go right as SDSU swept the Rainbows off the continent and out of first place as the streak reached 15.

Meanwhile, a frenzy of the strangest kind has gripped Montezuma Mesa. Athletic teams rarely cause the students to abandon their keggers and suntan oil and flock in vociferous throngs to arena, stadium or ballpark. But this team has captured the fancy of the apathetic multitudes.

“We’re used to playing in front of 20 or 40 people,” Dietz said, “but you couldn’t get near our park Sunday. People were sitting in lawn chairs where they could barely get a glimpse of the field. I haven’t seen this type of excitement for years. I remember one basketball game against Texas-El Paso, otherwise you have to go back to Don Coryell’s football teams.”

The most vocal of these fans inhabit an area known as Raggers’ Rail, the walkway behind Peterson Gym beyond right field. These folks do not exactly whisper sweet nothings to visiting right fielders.

During the weekend series, in fact, Hawaii changed right fielders because the first guy had ears as sensitive as satellite dishes. The next guy promptly kicked a ball away to let in yet another Aztec run. When the WAC’s postseason tournament begins here Thursday, visiting right fielders should go to work with tufts of cotton in their ears. Or ear muffs. Or a Walkman.

When Nebraska was here a year ago, its players became so enraged they threatened to dismantle Raggers’ Rail with their bats. Undaunted, the denizens noted that eggshells would be safe as long as Nebraska’s players were swinging those bats.

These people came equipped with brooms Sunday. All the better to help sweep Hawaii out of first place.

However, this team needed little help. It had come so far already against galactic odds.

At one point in the WAC season, the Aztecs were 1-8 and buried in a Salt Lake City snowbank. That eighth--and last--WAC loss was a 10-8 defeat at Utah on a snow-covered field April 14.

“That,” said Dietz, “was rock bottom.”

When the sun came out and the snow melted, the Aztecs blossomed like tulips. They played a tripleheader the next day, and won all three games.

At the Salt Lake City airport, the SDSU assistant coaches were buoyed by winning three games in one day. They were contemplating what it would take to get back into the race.

“I told them not to waste their time,” Dietz laughed. “I was trying to be a realist. Sometimes, you’re better off being a dreamer.”

Not even the dreamiest of dreamers could have envisioned a streak of 15 straight wins, but it happened. SDSU knocked off Utah four more times and then swept four games from Brigham Young, opening that series with a 14-run first inning.

That extended the streak to 11, and brought Hawaii to town.

The first game of the Hawaii series, Friday night, was probably a microcosm of the entire Aztec season. Hawaii was ahead, 6-1, after five innings and head, 7-4, in the top of the eighth.

This was when the Aztecs spent the last 10 in their checking account. The margin for error was zero, because Hawaii had the bases loaded and no one out. Relief pitcher Matt Haar was asked to walk barefoot through this volcano, and did so without a blister.

And now these Aztecs had the Rainbows right where they wanted them. Hawaii would play Snow Chief to the Aztecs’ Ferdinand.

Steve Montejano, a sophomore shortstop, would be the hero of this rally. He scored the second run of the eighth inning when he stole home on the front end of a double steal, then drove home the tying and winning runs in the ninth.

Hawaii still needed to win only one of the remaining three games, but it never got close. The Aztecs won those last three games as convincingly as Martina Navratilova would mop up the village champion from Waialua. They could have played them all in one day, and mercifully finished in about 45 minutes.

For the Aztecs, this was a weekend that could--and maybe will--last forever.

“What we pulled out,” Dietz said, “was like a fantasy. That’s what it was. A fantasy.”